Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Turkiye [Turkey] is a European country, since part of its territory lies in Europe. So the following sentence is true: Turkiye hosts the large solar power plant in any European country.
The plant, however, is not situated in Turkiye’s European provinces but in the Karapinar Desert, about sixty miles east of the central Anatolian city of Konya. Turkiye does not have a lot of desert landscape, being mostly green and benefiting from rainfall agriculture. But the Karapinar region is uncultivable.
Konya is a significant city of 2.3 million inhabitants (think Houston inside city limits) and a producer of machine tools and automobile parts. The city is famed for having the tomb of the great Muslim spiritual teacher and poet Jalaluddin Rumi, whose family fled the Mongol invasions of the 1200s in northern Afghanistan and ultimately settled in Konya.
So the Karapinar Desert is an hour and 15 minute drive to the east. And there, visitors see the most amazing sight. On 7 square miles of this forbidding territory, a vast solar farm with 3.2 million solar panels has been installed, with a nameplate capacity of 1.3 gigawatts. It turns the sun’s rays into enough power to provide electricity to almost all the some 2 million residents in Konya.
Kalyon Karapınar 1,350 MWP SPP – Central Control Building
Kalyon Karapınar 1.350 MWP SPP - Central Control Building (4K)
Moreover, the solar panels are not imported. Gulsen Cagatay at Anadolu writes, “The solar panels in the facility come from Türkiye’s first integrated solar ingot-wafer-module-cell production factory in Ankara, which was established by Kalyon Solar Energy Technologies Production Company and started production on Aug. 19, 2020.”
Although Turkiye has 70 solar panel factories, its domestic industry faces tariffs in Europe, where China has a more favored trade status, so Turkish panels face stiff competition from the Chinese. The economics are different inside Turkiye, of course, hence the use of Turkish panels at the government-backed Karapinar plant. It does sell its panels to Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, however, and one Turkish company is setting up a factory in Bulgaria so as to sell more cheaply into the European market.
Photo of Turkiye by Kadir ŞAHİN on Unsplash
As I noted in April of Turkiye’s solar industry, “solar power soared by 39% in 2024 compared to the previous year. In 2023, solar only accounted for 5.7% of Turkiye’s electricity, but it is now 7.5%.”
Turkiye installed 3.1 gigawatts in new solar capacity in the first half of 2025, bringing its cumulative solar capacity to 27 gigawatts. That achievement took it past its goals for the entire year.
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