EUD President Cem Aşık: Electricity Supply May Be Insufficient by 2024

Cem Aşık, President of the Electricity Producers Association (EÜD), warned that although Turkey still has excess capacity in electricity generation, it may face a supply shortage as of 2024 unless planned action is taken. Aşık also said that electricity storage for renewable investments is not yet feasible.

Cem Aşık, President of the Association of Electricity Producers (EÜD), delivered a speech at the meeting where the "MW100 - Turkey's 100 Largest Electricity Producers" survey, prepared for the second time this year by Energy Diary and the international consultancy company Kearney, was announced, and emphasised that the process of combating the pandemic has taught everyone the importance of doing business remotely in the electricity generation sector, as in all areas of life.

Emphasising that the importance of remote power plant management has been well understood in this process, Cem Aşık said: "Energy companies realised that they should be able to manage power plants remotely during the pandemic process. Certain trials were made for this. In the coming period, the legislation also needs to adapt to this. This is among the issues we will work on this year. It is not enough to make remote management technologically possible, we must also address the cyber security aspects."

Significant additional capacity

Noting that a significant amount of new capacity was added to Turkey's installed capacity in 2020 as seen in the MW100 2021 Survey, Cem Aşık, President of EÜD, said, "The end of YEKDEM in June also has an important effect on this. When we look at the newly added capacities, we see that the majority of them are renewable resources. Our prediction for the future is that new investments in Turkey, in parallel with the world, will focus on renewable resources, especially solar and wind." 

Risk of tightening after 2024

Cem Aşık, President of EÜD, drew attention to the fact that electricity generation capacity in Turkey is growing faster than consumption growth. Cem Aşık warned that although the excess capacity enables the relevant segments to act comfortably at the moment, as of 2024, a tightening may occur, contrary to today's situation, and continued as follows: "After 2024, we may experience a tightening in electricity supply capacity. Therefore, it is necessary to act in a planned manner. If we consider that the new capacity to come is renewable and will be more distributed, we realise that we need to change our mentality. In the short term, we need to make serious improvements in our transmission and then distribution infrastructures. We need to focus on applications such as smarter grids, microbalancing, demand side management and regional storage so that our system can manage this new capacity."