Hydroelectricity in Turkey
Government policies have generally supported building dams, but some are controversial in neighbouring countries, and some raise concerns about damage to the environment and wildlife.
[9] Climate change has reduced rainfall in some regions and has made it less regular, which has put stress on hydroelectric power plants.
Due to climate change in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, reduced precipitation is forecast, such as happened with the 2020 drought,[19][20][21] which caused a generation drop of over 10% compared to the previous year.
[28] Although dammed hydro can be dispatched within 3 to 5 minutes,[29] according to analysts at S&P Global, such generation instructions from the Turkish Electricity Transmission Corporation can be countermanded by the State Hydraulic Works, which may have contributed to blackouts in August 2021.
[34] Turkey built dams to meet its growing energy demand from rapid urbanization, industrialization, and population growth.
[40] According to Dr. Arda Bilgen, the reduced flow of the Euphrates was one reason Syria supported PKK attacks on Turkey in the 1980s.
[33] Since the beginning of the 21st century, private companies have been able to get long leases on rivers,[41] and DSI has mainly coordinated and supervised, rather than constructing its own power plants.
[41] Private-sector water-use agreements are usually for 49 years, with minimum discharge flow of 10% of the previous ten-year average.
[43] The three longest rivers in Turkey also have the highest capacity hydropower plants, the largest being Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates.
One of the most useful features of hydroelectric power plants is that generation can be quickly ramped up and down, to meet demand and balance wind and solar.
[47] According to the Bianet newspaper, sometimes small rivers have completely dried out in summer due to hydropower requirements.
[41] Like national energy policy as a whole,[52] decision-making for dam construction is centralized and not always transparent, which can lead to complaints by local people.
[40] Although a 1987 Euphrates water-sharing agreement assured that at least 500 cubic metres per second would leave Turkey, for Syria and Iraq,[57] this assumed that the water flow would not be reduced.
[58] Hydropower projects on the transboundary rivers Kura and Aras have been criticised by local environmental activists and have also caused tensions between Turkey and downstream Caucasian countries, such as Azerbaijan.
[59] As of February 2022[update], the feed-in tariff (FiT – excluding domestic components incentive) was 400 Turkish lira (TL)/MWh (about US$29), more than solar and wind but less than geothermal.
[60] However, in late 2021 the government and private-sector energy analysts had already predicted that the day-ahead price on the electricity market throughout 2022 would be higher than the FiT for the first year, thus resulting in a negative contract for difference.
Its 2018 general election manifesto did not mention it, and the party has opposed many recent dam projects, mostly due to environmental concerns.
[66] The Peoples' Democratic Party, in contrast, is more opposed to hydroelectric plants due to their impact on communities and environments.
[67] Arda Bilgen, a Turkish academic, says that since the 1960s the central government (inspired primarily by the United States Bureau of Reclamation) has used dam building to strengthen the central government's hold over Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia, to help grow these regions' economies, using a top-down approach.
