Turkey has come a long way in ensuring power supply security, while increasingly leaning toward renewable energy resources to fulfill demand, according to a recent report on the country’s top 100 largest electricity producers.
The report titled “MW100, Turkey's Top 100 Electricity Manufacturers Survey” was published in cooperation between Kearney international consulting firm's Turkey office and Turkey-based energy news portal Enerji Gunlugu. It revealed that the state giant Electricity Generation Inc. (EUAS) ranked first within the list with 20.54 megawatts (MW) production capacity.
The capacity of the EUAS corresponds to 23% of Turkey’s total installed capacity of 91.27 megawatts electrical (MWe). A total of 12.78 MWe of EUAS's installed power comes from hydroelectric power plants, the report stated, while 5.95 MWe is produced via natural gas plants, 1.80 MWe from domestic coal plants and 7 MWe from wind plants.
According to the report which took into consideration the installed capacities of the electric producers starting Dec. 31, 2019, ENKA – one of Turkey's largest construction and energy companies – took second place among the top producers with 3.83 MWe capacity while it is the top private sector producer on the list. ENKA stations produce 4% of the total production capacity of Turkey. Meanwhile, the experts that prepared the report stressed that although the capacity of ENKA is high, its production is gradually decreasing due to market conditions.
The ENKA was followed by Enerjisa, a joint venture of German E.ON and Turkey’s Sabancı Group with its 3.60 MWe installed power. The report highlighted that Enerjisa has the most balanced resource distribution among the top three in the MW100 list. Enerjisa's production portfolio includes 1.58 MWe of natural gas, 450 MWe of domestic coal, 1.35 MWe of hydroelectric power and 212 MWe of a wind power plant, the report said.
Eren Enerji, Celikler Holding, Cengiz Enerji, Limak Enerji, Aydem Enerji, İCDAS Steel, Energy, Shipyard and Transportation Industry. Inc. and Bilgin Enerji were among the top 10 electricity producers of the country. The report highlighted that the companies included in the survey produce some 85% of the total installed capacity of Turkey with a total of 77,585 MWe capacity.
In terms of resources, Eren Enerji in coal plants, EUAS in hydroelectric and natural gas, Guris Holding in wind plants and Zorlu Enerji in geothermal resources took the top spots in the list. Evaluating the research, Director of Kearney Turkey Onur Okutur said: “Strong increase in investments for renewable energy provided diversity on a resource basis.”
Enerji Gunlugu Editor-in-Chief Mehmet Kara pointed out this is the first time a report has portrayed such a holistic picture of the sector.
“The MW100 aims to support investors and sector stakeholders in meeting the need to create a data and analysis supported perspective,” he said, adding that they will continue to carry out research in the coming years with an expanded scope.
“I believe that we have the opportunity to see the horizons of the energy sector more clearly with MW100,” he added.
Source: Daily Sabah
Electricity Distribution Sector employees to provide uninterrupted and quality electricity services to Turkey, suspended planned maintenance within the scope of Kovid-19 measures. Providing service on a 7-24 basis, the sector employees continue their breakdown repair activities without interruption.
Serhat Cecen, ELDER Chairman of the Board said that, “We are prepared for all kinds of unusual scenarios. We endeavor to provide uninterrupted and high quality electrical energy for our citizens to stay home by following the warnings.”
The Electricity Distribution Sector suspended planned maintenance to be prepared for possible crisis scenarios, while focusing on breakdown maintenance and repair work. Serhat Cecen, ELDER Chairman of the Board said that, they took all precautions immediately since the beginning of the process. He said that, they have implemented a number of measures, including working home office for the safety of employees and customers, disinfection of work environments, and directing customer transactions to online channels to reduce crowded environments.
Cecen said that, “We have all our preparations and crisis plans for unexpected situations such as natural disasters or humanitarian crises. We would like to emphasize once again that it is important for our citizens not to go out of the houses except in essential situations by the recommendations of the Ministry of Health Coronavirus Scientific Board and the measures of Ministry of Interior. We are prepared for all kinds of unusual scenarios. We strive to provide uninterrupted and high quality electrical energy for our citizens to stay home.
Planned Maintenance Delayed
Cecen said that, electricity distribution companies in Turkey postponed their planned maintenance within the scope of the measures taken against the Kovid-19 virus. Cecen said that, “As an industry, we have organized our infrastructure according to this critical situation. Our field teams continue their efforts to provide high quality and uninterrupted energy to the citizen by taking precautions. While suspending planned maintenance, our fault repair activities will continue without interruption. We are ready to do our job as a sector for our country to get out of this crisis situation and normalize life.”
The huge disruption caused by the coronavirus crisis has highlighted how much modern societies rely on electricity.
Millions of people are now confined to their homes, resorting to teleworking to do their jobs, e-commerce sites to do their shopping, and streaming video platforms to find entertainment. A reliable electricity supply underpins all of these services, as well as powering the devices most of us take for granted such as fridges, washing machines and light bulbs.
In many countries, electricity is critical for operating the ventilators and other medical equipment in the hospitals treating the soaring numbers of sick people. In such an unsettling and rapidly evolving situation, electricity also ensures the timely communication of important information between governments and citizens, and between doctors and patients.
These services shouldn’t be taken for granted. In Africa, hundreds of millions of people live without any access to electricity making them far more vulnerable to disease and other dangers.
The coronavirus crisis reminds us of electricity’s indispensable role in our lives. It’s also providing insights into how that role is set to expand and evolve in the years and decades ahead.
Today, we’re witnessing a society that has an even greater reliance on digital technology to get on with day-to-day life, whose energy use is increasingly in the form of electricity, and where the power supply is more dependent than ever on wind and solar. In such a society, electricity security is the foundation of prosperity and stability – but ensuring that security requires action from governments.
In most economies that have taken strong confinement measures in response to the coronavirus – and for which we have available data – electricity demand has declined by around 15%, largely as a result of factories and businesses halting operations. Some of these economies, such as Spain and California, are among those with the highest shares of wind and solar electricity generation in the world. If electricity demand falls quickly while weather conditions remain the same, the share of variable renewables like wind and solar can become higher than normal.
In this way, the recent drop in electricity demand fast forwarded some power systems 10 years into the future, suddenly giving them levels of wind and solar power that they wouldn’t have had otherwise without another decade of investment in renewables. This is an important moment for our understanding of cleaner electricity systems, including some of the operational challenges that policy makers and regulators need to address to ensure electricity security.
With weaker electricity demand, power generation capacity is abundant. However, electricity system operators have to constantly balance demand and supply in real time. People typically think of power outages as happening when demand overwhelms supply. But in fact, some of the most high-profile blackouts in recent times took place during periods of low demand.
When electricity from wind and solar is satisfying the majority of demand, systems need to maintain flexibility in order to be able to ramp up other sources of generation quickly when the pattern of supply shifts, such as when the sun sets. A very high share of wind and solar in a given moment also makes the maintenance of grid stability more challenging.
System operators have developed ways to manage these challenges, but extraordinary developments – such as lockdowns of entire countries during global pandemics – create new tests. For example, the abrupt slowdown in industrial and business activity across much of Europe has reduced electricity demand, but it is also depriving power systems of a key source of flexibility. Under normal circumstances, large-scale electricity consumers such as factories can adjust their usage to help balance the system, but that option is hardly open today. This highlights the need for policy makers to carefully assess the potential availability of flexibility resources under extreme conditions. Although new forms of short-term flexibility such as battery storage are on the rise, most electricity systems rely on natural gas power plants – which can quickly ramp generation up or down at short notice – to provide flexibility, underlining the critical role of gas in clean energy transitions. Today, most gas power plants lose money if they are used only from time to time to help the system adjust to shifts in demand. The lower levels of electricity demand during the current crisis are adding to these pressures.
Thankfully for our electricity networks, most of the regions under strong confinement measures have so far avoided extreme weather conditions. For example, a situation in California that combined last year’s wildfires with this year’s lockdown measures would be extremely challenging.
Electricity networks are far more vulnerable than pipelines to extreme weather – a vital consideration for policy makers as they plan for increasingly electrified energy systems. The long-term task is to make networks tougher by investing in underground cables and decentralised storage – and by designing network layouts that are resilient to emergency situations such as hurricanes and floods.
Despite the increasing use of digital technologies in electricity systems, the coronavirus crisis has also reminded us of the essential role of skilled personnel. Network maintenance and repair is labour intensive and has to be done on site by workers and engineers. In most countries, governments have exempted network repair teams from the lockdowns. Organisations need to ensure staff members remain safe as they carry out their critical work. A key lesson of the current crisis is to make sure that electricity systems have sufficient resources not just of physical assets but also human capital. The increasing digitalisation of the electricity sector has unlocked new opportunities to make systems more efficient and flexible. However, it has also made networks more vulnerable to cyberattacks. Rather than trying to treat cybersecurity as an add-on, policy makers need to put it at the heart of how electricity systems are managed and operated. Today's crisis highlights the critical value of electricity infrastructure and know-how, which are underpinning the response to the coronavirus pandemic. It also reveals some vital insights about the future of electricity, and what policy makers need to do in order to ensure that tomorrow’s systems remain reliable even as they are transformed by the rise of clean energy technologies. Governments are rightly focused on the immediate public health emergency, but they have to remain vigilant on electricity security and safeguard vital assets amid the extreme volatility in markets. In these extraordinary times, we can manage without many things, but we can’t manage without electricity.
Source: International Energy Agency
Wind and solar developments will be delayed in North America because the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic is disrupting the supply chain, panellists in a Norton Rose Fulbright webinar agreed.
Miguel Prado, CEO of EDP Renewables North America, said his company is starting to get ‘force majeure’ notices from suppliers — a legal warning that unforeseeable circumstances will prevent the party from fulfilling a contract.
Prado, whose company has more than 1GW in construction or pre-construction, said some wind projects expected to be commissioned in 2020 will now be delayed to 2021, causing a hit to his company’s revenue.
Paul Gaynor, CEO of Longroad Energy, noted a slow-down in permitting and requests for grid interconnection because the people his company needs to contact are working remotely.
Engineering, procurement and construction contractors are also starting to warn clients they may not be able to get the people to fulfil a job, said Jim Torgerson, CEO of Avangrid.
Meanwhile, requests for proposals may get delayed so much that there will be a rush of them in the autumn, predicted Guy Vanderhaegen, CEO of solar developer Origis Energy.
On the finance side, the lender market has become more uncertain because of the pandemic, with lenders starting to back off primarily because they are unsure of pricing, said Mike Garland, CEO of Pattern Energy.
He called for a two-year extension of the Production and Investment Tax Credits and direct relief on tax equity requirements.
Meanwhile, Gaynor called for flexibility on the need to take delivery within 105 days of ‘safe harbour’ equipment bought at the end of 2019.
The ‘safe harbour’ provision allows wind projects to be considered as having begun construction by the end of the year if a minimum of 5% of the project’s total capital cost is incurred.
Wood Mackenzie has downgraded its forecast for 2020 installations due to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. It now predicts 73GW will be installed this year — a 5GW decline from previous projections before the virus’ spread.
China and the US which were forecast to deliver record volumes of new capacity, will take the brunt of the impact on global installations. In Europe, Spain, Italy and France could be hit harder on a percentage basis due to lockdown measures inhibiting worker mobility, according to Wood Mackenzie.
Factory closures, like those at Siemens Gamesa, will likely result in turbine installation delays both domestically and possibly for the US.
Border closures between European countries could also impact aggressive build schedules, especially for markets like Norway, where foreign project teams are unable to enter.
Australia has a substantial pipeline of projects for completion in 2020-2021, most with 3.6-4.2MW rated turbines imported from Europe. Supply disruptions from lockdowns in Spain and Germany could jeopardise build schedules.
Turbine production and wind farm construction in China are recovering with local governments now encouraging local facilities to return to work as the outbreak is believed to be under control.
Though supply disruptions are emerging in western Europe, China’s supply of critical components such as wind turbine blades to the US outweighs that of Spain by two to one.
India has been used as the main alternative to Chinese wind energy component production.
An interruption in supply could restrict installations both domestically and abroad in western markets, according to Wood Mackenzie.
Source: Wind Power Monthly
Norwegian oil group Equinor and Italian oil and gas contractor Saipem, which is 30%-owned by Italian energy giant Eni, said on Friday that they have signed an agreement to jointly develop a “floating solar panel park technological solution for near-coastal applications.”
Future projects will be based on a technology developed by Moss Maritime, a unit of Saipem that provides engineering services to the offshore oil and gas industry, as well as the renewable energy sector. The solution is a modularized system that has been designed for easy fabrication, transportation and onsite installation, the companies said, without providing any additional technical details.
The technology could be applied in areas in which there are no large water reservoirs, as well as in very windy areas, according to Saipem. “The ambition is to be one of the leading providers of near coastal and offshore solutions for floating solar panel parks,” the company said.
Equinor, formerly known as Statoil, announced plans to enter the solar energy business in February 2017, when it launched a $197 million fund dedicated to renewables. At the time, it rebranded as Equinor to reflect its transition into clean energy.
Saipem recently expanded into the renewable energy business. In November, it secured two contracts worth €750 million to build single wind farms in the United Kingdom and Taiwan.
Source: pv magazine
The UK's national shutdown to flatten the curve of COVID-19 infections could cost the consumer an additional £52 million ($61 million) a week on household energy bills as an estimated 16.8 million people stay at home.
Households where people have to stay home may each spend an extra £16 a month on energy — equivalent to £195 (approximately $230) a year for those on a poor-value deal.
Energy providers are offering help to customers unable to pay their bills, and struggling consumers should contact their supplier as soon as possible, says UK-based energy service switching company Uswithc.com.
The company offers bill-payers tips to reduce their energy consumption while working from home.
About 16.8 million people are estimated to be not going in to their normal workplace as a result of measures to delay the spread of COVID-19, and using more gas and electricity at times when their home would usually be empty and people would be at work or at school.
Workers who would likely be out between the hours of 8am and 6pm, for example, will use more energy by boiling the kettle, using the heating, having lights on, using their computer and television, and charging devices like smartphones, laptops and tablets.
Uswitch estimates that households where people are working from home will use an additional 25% more electricity and 17% more gas per day — which adds up to a potential yearly increase of up to £195 per household or £16 per month for customers on expensive Standard Variable Tariffs.
The energy industry is working with the government to help households affected by the coronavirus outbreak. Measures announced for struggling energy customers include reassessing, reducing or pausing debt repayments and bill payments, and not disconnecting any household.
Suppliers will make some decisions on a case-by-case basis, so anyone who is struggling with their bill or repayment plan should contact their provider to explain their situation and agree what form of help their energy company can give.
Source: Smart Energy International
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