A goodwill agreement to build a 60 MW solar power plant in Şanlıurfa was signed with China. The investment in the city in Turkey’s southeast is worth USD 60 million (EUR 55.95 million), Anadolu Agency’s Energy Terminal reported. State-owned nuclear company CGN and Turkish renewable company Else signed the agreement in Ankara to establish 60 plants with unlicensed capacity.
Turkey’s total installed power capacity surpassed 71 GW, while the share of solar facilities under 1 MW in the country, without the need for a license, is 0.2%.
“Although we are one of the leading nuclear companies, we also focus on renewable energy investments,” Xing Liu, director of new business department at China Nuclear Power Engineering Co. (CGN) said. Turkey is important within China’s economic cooperation strategy, he said. “The partnership between CGN and Else started with solar energy but we hope to collaborate in other energy areas as well.”
The project will be operational in the first half of 2016, once all the approvals have been given, said Mustafa Herdem, general manager of Else. He also underlined that once the project is successfully completed in Şanlıurfa, he expects that projects in three other cities in the country, which will be determined later, will follow suit. Herdem explained that talks are taking place to establish new projects in third countries. If the political and financial states of the countries are agreeable, the projects will go ahead, he said and added that the next step in the partnership will be to invest in solar projects in Iran, Kazakhstan and Jordan.
