New wind power plants to be established in most suitable regions

BALIKESİR, Çanakkale, Aydın and Muğla, the regions selected for power plants with a combined 1,000 megawatts (MW) to be established with an investment of about $1 billion as part of the wind power Renewable Energy Resource Areas (YEKA RES-2), rank among the “high wind class” regions.

This project aims to ensure the participation of medium-sized investors in the four separate tenders, each with a capacity of 250 megawatts, to launch the power plants more rapidly and to finance them more easily.

According to information compiled from the YEKA RES-2 tender specifications, the tenders (deadline March 7, 2019) will be held for four different regions.

The companies will be able to bid for YEKA RES-2 tenders to establish four 250 MW wind power plants in Balıkesir, Çanakkale, Aydın and Muğla, as a consortium, while foreign companies will not be required to have Turkish partners.

The same company can apply for all regions. Companies need to have financial adequacy, sales revenue of TL 150 million ($27.5 million) or more in the last three years and an asset size of TL 45 million or more as of the end of 2018.

As the project will be designed to provide power for domestic use, the establishment of a turbine factory will not be required, but the turbines used in the power plant will be 55 percent domestic.

The capacity of each turbine to be used in the power plants with an investment value of $1 billion will be at least 3 megawatts or more and turbines with a larger capacity than the YEKA RES-1 project will be used. The project should create indirect employment for approximately 3,000 people in installation and manufacturing in sub-industries.

While the designated areas under the YEKA RES-2 project are among the “high wind class” (class 1 and class 2) regions, four different tenders will be held for each of the 250 MW power plants, ensuring diversity with the participation of large investors as well as medium-sized investors in the tenders.

Companies contracted to construct the power plants will have a right to operate the plants for 49 years.

In the tenders - with an initial ceiling price of $5.50 per kilowatt-hour - the power purchase time is 15 years from the date of the signing of the right-of-use contract. The contract price for each tender will be TL 5,000 ($937), and these costs will not be refunded.

The winning company or companies must apply for a pre-license within the first 24 months and start to generate electricity within the following maximum 36 months. At the end of a maximum of 60 months, the first electricity generation will take place in the wind power plants.

Power plants - with a total installed power of 1,000 MW - will generate 3.4 billion kWh of electricity per year when they reach full capacity and will be able to cover approximately 1.1 percent of Turkey’s electricity consumption - 294.5 billion kWh as of the end of 2017.

A tender for the first YEKA project of 1,000 MW was held last year in August, creating an investment volume of $1 billion. Eight consortia, including some of the world’s largest turbine manufacturers, participated in the tender.

The tender resulted in a world record feed-in-tariff at $3.48 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) offered by the Siemens-TürkerlerKalyon consortium. The total capacity will be installed in Sivas, Edirne, Kırklareli and Eskişehir.

The consortium will invest over $1 billion in wind facilities. With the introduction of domestic wind power plants, a minimum of 3 billion kWh of electricity will be generated each year to meet the electricity demand of approximately 1.1 million households.