Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Saudi-owned daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat [The Middle East] reports that during a visit of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Riyadh, a multi-billion dollar investment by Saudi Arabia in 5 gigawatts of renewable energy projects was announced. The initial project will be two solar farms with 2 gigawatts of generation capacity to provide electricity to 2.1 million households in the central Anatolian provinces of Sivas and Karaman, involving a Saudi investment of $2 billion. Turkiye is committing to buy the electricity from the Saudi concern at a fixed price for the next 30 years.
Amazingly enough, Saudi Arabia has renewable power firms such as ACWA that do big solar and wind projects in the region, for instance in Morocco, the Middle Eastern country that has made the most progress on renewables.
The US International Trade Administration writes of Turkiye, “Installed capacities are distributed as 27% hydroelectric, 21% natural gas, 19% solar, 18% coal, 11% wind . . .”
Turkiye has relatively few fossil fuel resources and so depends heavily on expensive imports. It does have some brown coal, which is dirty and inefficient, and can’t be used for some important purposes. It is in any case importing more and more expensive black coal.
Turkiye also imports most of its fossil gas. The country in recent years has depended heavily on Russia and Iran for these imports. They have the advantage of being able to supply Turkiye by pipeline, which is much cheaper than delivering gas canisters over the seas. But both countries face US and European Union sanctions and Turkiye gets a lot of pressure from Washington and Brussels over them. Moreover, neither country is very stable, what with the Ukraine War on the one side and the Iran-US-Israel tangle on the other.
Turkiye has several strategies to reduce dependence on those two states, which are international pariahs. One is to bring in more Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) by ship from countries such as Algeria, Nigeria, Qatar and the US. Another is to develop its own undersea gas fields in the Black Sea. Yet another is to build a nuclear power plant, which is expected to supply 10% of Turkiye’s electricity when it is completed. The problem, which no one wants to talk about, is that LNG is relatively expensive, as is nuclear.
Hence the interest of Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar in solar and wind (though he is very much an “all of the above” energy theorist). One area in which Turkiye could make a lot of progress is rooftop solar, which is impeded by permitting difficulties in Turkiye’s highly bureaucratic energy sector. Turkiye inherited bureaucracy from the Byzantines, which tells you all you need to know.
Cheap solar and wind can replace imports of expensive and possibly unreliable fossil gas as well as imports of expensive and highly polluting black coal. (Turkiye subsidizes domestic brown coal in a disturbing and anti-ecological way).
Still, Turkiye installed 4.7 gigawatts of new solar capacity in 2025.
Photo of Istanbul by Imad Alassiry on Unsplash
Turkiye now has about 25 gigawatts in installed solar capacity, which supplies slightly more of its electricity than does coal. But consider that France, a more advanced country in most ways, only has 27 gigawatts of solar at present.
Neither of them is Germany, which has 117 gigawatts of solar and plans to reach 215 GW by 2030.
Still, Turkiye has achieved 33% of its 2035 renewable energy targets, suggesting that the cheapness of wind and solar is bringing in investments at such a high rate that the government is itself a little surprised at how fast the transition is taking place.
Saudi Arabia itself plans to get 50% of its electricity from renewables in only 4 years. Saudi Arabia fuels some 38% of its power plants with petroleum that it could be selling on the world market for a profit instead of using it up in subsidized electricity at a loss.
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