Cem Ozkok, Chairman of the Energy Investors Association (GÜYAD), said that there is an appetite for energy investments in Turkey, but new cost-effective financing models need to be created.
“We believe that our Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources will continue to show sensitivity to these and similar issues,” Ozkok said.
Ozkok, who met with a group of journalists in Ankara, reminded that they represent 95 percent of renewable energy investments and emphasized the increasing importance of financing for future investments. Ozkok said that they will organize a finance summit at the end of February and that they have increased their efforts to get the public sector to support them in finding financing.
Ozkok said that the second agenda of the sector is transmission lines and that more capacity needs to be created in transmission for investment. “In order for Turkey’s energy transformation and projections to become reality, Turkey needs to transition from a traditional centralized and unidirectional electricity system to a more distributed and interactive system where consumers are the focal point. Currently, however, distributed energy is not widely used in Turkey. We have been following in the press that Turkish Electricity Transmission Corporation TEİAŞ is in talks with the World Bank to accelerate investments in transmission.”
“Ministry should grant permissions”
Stating that as renewable energy producers, they are working towards the carbon implementation at the border within the scope of the Green Deal, which Europe started measuring and monitoring on October 1, Ozkok said, “We do not have the chance to make faster progress with the energy efficiency-based agreements currently used in our market. For this, it is necessary to provide the legal infrastructure for bilateral purchase and sale agreements in unlicensed generation for large individual consumers. In this way, long-term contracts will come to life, and at the same time, it will be easier to obtain financing. On the other hand, such contracts will also bring predictability in energy costs for the industry by providing a price guarantee.” Cem Ozkok said that as a sector, they demand uniformity and convenience in municipal practices and that the practice of municipal permits for industrial investments being granted by the Ministry of Industry and Technology can also be provided for energy investments.
