Turkey is a country with high potential for renewable energy resources such as hydropower, solar energy, wind energy, biomass and geothermal energy. In the past two articles of mine, I have explained the hydropower, solar energy and wind energy. As such, it is time to explain you all about the potential and implementation of the biomass and geothermal energy in Turkey.

While investigating the geothermal energy potential of Turkey, we must keep in mind that geothermal energy is a type of energy. This energy can be used to mainly turn into two things: heat (thermal uses) and electricity. Turkey?s geothermal potential for thermal uses is 31.5 GW and for electricity it is 4.5 GW as a total of 36 GW. Turkey uses geothermal energy mainly for heating since its whole potential is almost ten times higher than that of other?s. West of Turkey compared to other regions has the highest potential for geothermal energy in Turkey. In fact, 80% of whole geothermal energy capacity is located in the West of Turkey. Compared to other renewable resources? potential in Turkey, this number is quite low. For instance, the solar energy capacity is around 50 TWh while the whole of geothermal potential is only 35GW. Despite that it is the third most used renewable energy resource of Turkey after hydropower and wind power. In 2010, Turkey produced 795 MW that was directly used for thermal purposes and 100 MW of electricity from its geothermal energy resources. Of course, these numbers, compared to the total potential, are really low. While Turkey is aiming to increase the total installed capacity for geothermal electricity to 600 MW, that is only 13% of whole capacity. As such, Turkey still does not pay geothermal energy the attention it needs.

 Biomass is any natural material derived from living organisms. This biomass can be used to produce electricity by at first, converting these to hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Then burning these gases to produce electricity from the turbines in the power plants. Since biomass even takes things like scrap wood, mill residuals and forest resources that are not likely to be consumed entirely any time soon, and that it does not increase carbon emission like fossil fuels are the two reasons why biomass is considered a renewable energy. Despite all its advantages, the reason we do use it the most in Turkey and around the world is due to it being too expensive at the moment.

The natural biomass potential of Turkey is 372 TWh. In fact, 53% of the natural potential whereas only about 198 TWh of it is suitable for electricity production (economically feasible) in Turkey. However, only 0.45 TWh were used in 2010 which is about 0.2% of the whole potential. Also, North-West of Turkey is where biomass can be found the most. All in all, Turkey is still new to the biomass technology is yet to do a significant implementation of the technology.

In conclusion, each part of Turkey is rich on specific renewable energy resources. In the South-East, there is tremendous amount of solar energy in the West, there are wind power and geothermal energy in the North-West, there is high biomass potential and in the East, there are solar energy and high hydropower potential. Despite these facts, we use our renewable resources to provide only 15% of the total energy need.