On the way to efficiently supplying more than half of Turkey’s electricity from renewables

The use of renewable energy resources, primarily wind and solar, is expected to grow significantly within Turkey’s power system. There has been rapid growth in the installed renewable electricity generation capacity in recent years and Turkey saw a record year in 2017. As deployment of renewable electricity generation technologies is on the eve of acceleration, there is a need to better understand how the rising share of wind and solar will affect Turkey’s power system.

In this paper, which is based on detailed quantitative modeling of the Turkish transmission system performed by Turkish EPRA Elektrik Enerji, we have assessed in more detail the benefits of distributing wind and solar generation across Turkey by taking into account local demand and grid capacity.

The positive impact of such a system-integration strategy becomes evident at wind and solar shares of 30%. A partial reallocation of wind and solar from best sites to slightly less resource-intensive areas has a negligible impact on the overall output of solar and wind power, which would go down by between 3% and 5%. The benefits of the system-driven strategy may well outweigh its costs: The need for additional investments in transmission grids and sub-station capacity can be
reduced by 6% compared to cases in which power plants are placed only in areas with the best solar and wind resources.
Moreover, implementing a system-driven strategy—thereby also balancing generation variability to some degree—would nearly annul solar and wind curtailment and cut down one-quarter of total redispatch, which would otherwise be needed to guarantee secure and reliable grid operation.