All the devices that we use in a daily basis use a kind of energy and provide us different types of energy such as heat, electricity or velocity. These energy resources are crucial for our lives especially the electricity as it is like the mother of all other types of energy. Yesterday, on 31^st of March all of Turkey's electricity was cut off for almost a day. Although the officials have not made a press conference regarding the cause of it, it is likely that one of the power plants were shut down overloading the other ones in the country. After this event, I asked myself: "What kinds of energy resources does my country use to produce electricity" As such, this article of mine will aim to give you all an understanding of Turkey's position on the matter.

As you are also aware, today the world?s energy resources are mostly non-renewable resources, mostly fossil fuels. Turkey, sadly enough, is like the rest of the world where more than half of the energy income is depended on thermal power plants. In 2003, Turkey produced 140 billion kWh of electricity of which 63 billion kWh were produced by thermal power plants that used natural gas and 104 billion kWh in total were produced by the nonrenewable sources whereas only 36 billion kWh of the production belonged to renewable energy resources such as hydroelectric power plants. As you can see from these statistics as well, Turkey produces electricity with the help of fossil fuels.

To be more precise: Today, Turkey produces its electricity from three big resources which are coal, natural gas and hydroelectricity. Let us start with coal. There are basically two types of coal in Turkey: anthracite and lignite. Total reserve for lignite is 13.3 billion tons and for anthracite, which is far more dangerous to the environment if burned compared to lignite, it is 14.5 billion tons. With such huge quantities of coal as a resource there are twenty thermal power plants around my country seventeen of which uses lignite and two of which uses anthracite. Today about 25% of the whole electricity is produced by burning these coal at the power plants. Needless to say, these have a huge effect on the CO2 emission of the country.

Another resource of my country for producing electricity is natural gas. There are seventeen thermal power plant that use natural gas. There is 6.84 m³ of natural gas in Turkey which is why it covers up about 34-44% of the whole country's electricity. Without a doubt, natural gas has a negative impact on the environment as well. Actually, according to the National Greenhouse Gases Foundation's report, 77.8% of the greenhouse gases is produced during the process of generating electricity in Turkey and 82.5% of these greenhouse gases is, in fact, CO2. So we are generating electricity while contributing to the global warming!

The last resource which I am about to tell you all is hydroelectricity. This resource is the only major renewable resource that Turkey uses today to generate electricity. In fact, surprising enough, in 2010 38% of Turkey?s electricity was produced by hydroelectricity and other renewable energy resources. From the bright side, that year hydroelectricity was the energy resource which Turkey used the most to generate electricity compared to both natural gas and coal. On the dark side, still the remaining 62% is generated by the fossil fuels. The most efficient way to make these numbers come closer is to use hydroelectricity with maximum capacity as it is the renewable energy resource with the most reserves in Turkey. In 2012, the total amount of hydroelectricity that Turkey uses is 19,619 MW (mega-watt) while the total potential is 36,000-40,000 MW. Despite the fact that the government is aiming to use all of the potential of these resources by 2023, a real action is yet to be taken.

In other words, today Turkey depends on its fossil fuels to generate electricity for about 70%. TO make this number go down a little bit prompting the construction of more hydroelectric power plants is the easiest and the fastest solution my country has. I hope that with all these numbers in our minds we can have better future.