Amid Hormuz Energy Crisis, Renewables generate 61% of Turkish Electricity
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – In Q1, Turkiye generated 61% of its electricity from renewable sources.
In July, solar electricity generation soared to 15% of the total, up by half again over last year’s average. The country’s sunny summers are ideal for solar energy generation.
Already by the end of 2025, wind and solar alone supplied 22% of the country’s electricity, according to the Ember energy consultancy. Turkiye also is rich in hydroelectric power, its biggest single source of renewable energy, and has small amounts of geothermal and biofuels. Turkiye’s solar capacity doubled between 2023 and 2025, an impressive achievement by any measure.
Remember that Turkiye’s energy appetite, as a fast-growing economy, is enormous and has been growing 5% a year. So renewables not only have to replace existing coal and gas, they have to meet substantial new demand.
While Turkiye and Morocco lead the greater Middle East region in wind and solar, Turkiye is toward the bottom of the pack among the big electricity users in Europe for those two renewables.
Turkiye’s parliament passed a climate law last year that enshrines in statute its commitments under the Paris Climate Treaty of 2015. That is to say, Turkiye is miles better on this issue than the United States.
The country is also making strides in electrifying transport. in 2021, it had only 7,698 EVs, but today there are nearly half a million electric vehicles on the road. Pure battery EVs and plug-in hybrids together account for 25% of new car sales. Turkiye has nearly 48,000 charging stations. That number is wholly insufficient. Car sales fell 8% in H1 because of tight credit, but plug-in hybrid sales beat this trend, growing 6%, likely because of high gasoline prices owing to the Iran War. Pure EVs were not as popular as hybrids, probably because of the still inadequate charging infrastructure.
On October 1, gasoline prices in Turkiye will skyrocket, as the government halts subsidies and the Strait of Hormuz continues to be partially blocked. We’ll see how EVs do in the aftermath.
The bad news is that 34% of the Turkish grid is still supplied by coal, and 2/3s of that coal is imported. Turkiye could save billions and have a clean, efficient grid, if it accelerated the replacement of coal with renewables.
Turkiye used to be almost entirely dependent on coal for power and heating. I remember back in the 1970s when I first visited the country how bad the smog was. First fossil gas and now renewables have displaced much of that coal use. But not enough. Coal is the devil’s own rock, the most polluting of the fossil fuels.
Actually, Turkiye’s current installed capacity of solar would cover some 20% of the country’s needs with enough battery capacity; at the moment half the solar potential is wasted because the panels only generate power in daylight. The same for wind. The country has 40 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity, but at the moment that does not translate in 40 GW of electricity generation.
Photo by Yusuf Onuk on Unsplash
That situation is changing rapidly because of a 2022 law that requires solar and wind facilities to budget for battery storage as well. For instance, a 122 megawatt wind farm being built at Antalya will have 122 MW of battery storage. Turkiye already has 33 gigawatts of installed battery capacity, twice what is typical for its European peers.
Turkiye is planning to invest $200 bn. in the energy sector, including renewables and nuclear, over the next nine years, It is aiming to triple its installed wind and solar capacity to 120 gigawatts by 2035. This achievement would require 8 gigawatts of new solar and wind installations annually, a step up from the 6.5 gigawatts of panels and turbines the country has been putting in yearly since 2023.