A Solar City Tries to Rise in Turkey Despite Lack of Federal Support

ANTALYA, Turkey—Turkey's weak policy support for solar power hasn't stopped the sun-soaked southern city of Antalya from forging ahead with plans to exploit its solar resource — and to encourage other local governments to follow suit.

In April, Antalya opened its long-awaited "Solar House," the first step in its push to become Turkey's first and only solar city.

The environmental education center and renewable energy showcase boasts 24 one-kilowatt photovoltaic (PV) panels, among other clean energy solutions such as a windmill and a track that generates power from bicycles.

The model house cost about $600,000 and was 90 percent funded by Turkish companies and 10 percent by the United Nations Development Program. It will produce and store all the energy it consumes and feed excess power back into the grid — though it won't profit from doing so.

The country's energy authority doesn't yet buy surplus electricity from small producers of solar power. This is partly why the cost of installing solar panels remains prohibitive for nearly all Antalya residents, local observers say.

"We need to show the Turkish people how we can produce solar energy, because it's a very new concept for most Turks," Mustafa Akaydın, the mayor of Antalya, told SolveClimate News in an interview.

According to Akaydın, the Solar House is "preparation" for its wider Solar City Green Antalya plan. Over the next decade and a half, the municipality hopes to transform itself into a clean energy dynamo on par with solar cities like Malmö, Sweden and  Barcelona, Spain.

Though the financial support structure for the program is still fuzzy, the goal, at least, is clear: "We want to be the pioneers here and show the rest of the country about this solar potential," said Akaydın.

Massive Untapped Potential

More than one million terawatt-hours of solar radiation hit Turkey each year. Solar leaders Spain and California, by comparison, receive approximately 0.8 million terrawatt-hours annually.

Theoretically, installing PV arrays across some 770 square miles — one half of one percent of Turkey's landmass — could supply the nation's current electrical capacity.

At present, PV systems account for just 5 megawatts of installed capacity. Turkey's 8-gigawatt solar thermal capacity is seen as slightly more promising, but still accounts for less than 1 percent of the country's overall energy production.

Antalya's municipal government doesn't yet have a goal for how much extra solar power capacity it hopes to add. For now, there is no accepted international definition of what it takes to earn the moniker of "solar city," though several dozen such cities are said to exist throughout the world, including 25 in the United States.

The European Solar Cities Initiative, a project of the International Solar Energy Society, defines solar communities by their "large-scale integration of sustainable energy sources into city planning and urban concepts."

In that spirit, Antalya is developing other renewable energies besides solar. A new waste management plant, for instance, will collect 60 percent of the city's sewage and turn it into purified mud, which can then be converted into biogas.

The biogas-to-energy conversion facility is still under construction — a new component was finished the same week the Solar House opened — but in two months it will have a capacity of 2 megawatts, according to Münevver Ateş, environmental director at the plant. Once the facility is able to collect all the sewage in the city, its capacity will double.

More important than its capacity, however, is the fact that Antalya's plant will produce all the energy it consumes, said Ateş, making it the only sustainable waste management plant in Turkey. "Many Turkish visitors come to study our example."

Starting with the Rooftops

Antalya's effort to boost its solar capacity will begin with a campaign to encourage individuals to install solar panels on their houses, though it won't be easy.