With an installed geothermal capacity of 1,6 megawatts (MW), from only 18 MW in 2022, Turkey has risen to first place in Europe and fourth place globally for geothermal capacity.
The announcement came as Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan virtually attended the opening ceremony of four energy facilities in the Manisa province, Western Turkey, which are particularly important for the country’s security of supply.
“A total of 68 million citizens of ours have access to natural gas,” said President Erdoğan. “We didn’t pause our natural gas investments in 2020 when public investments across the world came to a standstill. We started to deliver natural gas to 39 more districts and towns despite the pandemic. We will further increase our natural gas investments in 2021.”
Turkey started to focus on energy investments particularly following the discovery of 405 billion cubic metres of natural gas in the Black Sea, what the President has defined as the largest-ever natural gas reserve of the country’s history.
“We are working to establish an energy industry that is based on domestic resources as much as possible in line with the principle of Independent Energy, Powerful Turkey,” continued Mr Erdoğan.
Turkey tripled its installed electricity capacity, which Ankara sees as indispensable for national development, to 96,000 megawatts (MW) in 18 years.
In particular, Mr Erdoğan underlined that domestic resources make up 63.5 per cent of the country’s existing installed power and 51.7 per cent of those domestic resources comes from renewable resources, or clean energy.
