Tapping the Potential: Turkey and Renewable Energy Sources

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges facing the modern world is competition and conflict over the sharing of energy resources within the international system. Energy security challenges among the nations have emerged as a result of the unequally distributed fossil fuel resources around the world. Tapping the Renewable Energy Source (RES) potential is becoming critically significant in the face of depletion of conventional energy sources and their negative impact on the environment. Therefore, as a geopolitically important actor, Turkey has set some RES targets for 2023 and tries to achieve these targets with supportive regulations and legislation to raise its standards to European Union levels. Firstly, this chapter presents the RES potential and the current level of RES development in Turkey. Furthermore, it also discusses various impediments against the rapid progress of RES investments and reaching the RES targets in Turkey. Overall, we conclude that Turkey has a remarkable economic RES potential, which is largely untapped both in Turkey but also elsewhere around the world. This is mainly due to various barriers, such as lengthy administrative procedures, stop on license provision observed in various instances and economic issues. Therefore, in the current situation, it seems that the 2023 targets can be reached only if hard and consistent work and policies are continued in Turkey.

Paper presented during CEVI session at “The 13th international conference of the International Society for the Intercommunication of New Ideas (ISINI) which was held at the WSB University in Wrocław, Poland, 30–31 August 2018.”