The exciting opportunities of the Turkish geothermal market

Kizildere geothermal plant, Turkey (source: www.saraykoy.gov.tr)

Alexander Richter 3 Ara 2014

Currently, I am attending the GeoPower Global Markets event in Istanbul, Turkey. The upbeat vibe of the Turkish geothermal market clearly rubs off and it is great to experience a market where things are moving.

Zorlu Enerji one of the larger developers here presented a great video flying over its Kizildere geothermal plant and described how much ahead Turkey will be in its goals for geothermal power generation.

With an installed capacity today of 410 MW, Turkey has also moved greatly up the rankings of the countries with geothermal power generation. But there is more in the pipeline. Projects with a combined power generation capacity of 370 MW are currently being developed.

Currently there are 60 geothermal developers with projects at various stages of development. While half of the projects are in exploration, 27% are in the drilling preparation stage and 23% are drilling and operating.

With a feed-in-tariff of a maximum of $0.132 per kWh, the market clearly is interesting for investors, that are mostly local companies supported by multi-national loans.

There are now a variety of different group of suppliers providing plants, most of the binary plants. So far Ormat has been the main supplier, other companies like Exergy, Atlas Copco are strongly coming in.

In the panel discussion right now there are also discussions about the increasing lack of capacity within the geothermal market in Turkey and the need for capacity building and foreign support. So there are opportunities while it seems to be important to have a local presence and some kind of partnership and/ or local content.