Türkiye has launched efforts with the World Bank to secure up to $6 billion in financing to expand the country’s electricity transmission capacity, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said on Monday.
Bayraktar’s remarks came following his meeting with Antonella Bassani, the World Bank’s vice president for Europe and Central Asia.
Türkiye’s power consumption has tripled in the last two decades and is expected to increase even faster in the coming years due to the long-term energy transformation, which involves replacing fossil fuel energy with electricity.
Türkiye has limited oil and natural gas resources and suffers from a high current account deficit due to vast energy imports. It has been incentivizing investments in renewable power plants and has sought to develop domestic resources and expand international partnerships in oil and gas exploration.
“We agreed to initiate work on a financing package amounting to $6 billion in the first stage,” Bayraktar wrote on the social media platform X of his meeting with Bassani.
“This financing will be used for the high-voltage electricity transmission investments we plan to make in order to reach our target of 120,000 megawatts of installed wind and solar capacity by 2035,” he said.
Türkiye currently has around 36 gigawatts (GW) of installed wind and solar capacity. It plans major upgrades to its national electricity grid to handle rapidly growing renewable energy output and future nuclear generation, while also strengthening interconnections with neighboring countries.
The projects include expanding high-voltage transmission lines and increasing cross-border capacity with Azerbaijan, Georgia and Bulgaria.
Bayraktar said earlier that the full scope of these transmission upgrades will require around $28 billion in investment.
The minister stressed that the expanding fleet of renewable power plants, along with planned new nuclear power projects, will require a more robust and flexible transmission system to efficiently deliver electricity to demand centers.
During the meeting with Bassani, Bayraktar said they also discussed cooperation opportunities in areas including renewable energy, nuclear power and natural gas.
Türkiye plans to build three conventional plants. The first one, Akkuyu, is being built by the Russian conglomerate Rosatom in the southern province of Mersin.
The $20 billion, 4.8 GW, four-reactor Akkuyu will bring Türkiye into the small club of nations with civil nuclear energy. Once fully operational, it is expected to generate around 10% of Türkiye’s electricity.
The first reactor is scheduled to go online next year. The country aims to reach 7.2 GW of nuclear capacity by 2035 and 20 GW by 2050. It plans to build the second and third plants in the northern Sinop and Thrace regions.
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