From the small, ancient Turkish town of Burdur comes exciting news in solar today.
Burdur happens to be one of the oldest settlements in the world, dating back to 7000 BC, centred around a spectacular lake. How ironic that such a place has become home to the largest roof mounted solar system in this country, which thus far has rarely featured in the world of solar. According to the EPIA, Turkey had an installed capacity of around 16MW in 2012, but could leap to between 60 and 250MW by the end of this year, on the back of a desperate need for new capacity.
Installed in May this year and recently commissioned, the 495kW roof top project adds more than 3% to National PV capacity and was developed by a consortium including Turkish based Solimpeks (who also have an office here focused on PV Hybrid products), Panasonic and local project manager Seiso Solar.
With an average of 2,640 hours of sunshine a year, Turkey offers excellent conditions for solar energy. At the same time, however, the dry, hot climate can cause module performance to drop. “HIT modules are based on a sandwich construction of hybrid monocrystalline wafers coated with a thin amorphous silicon,” explained Daniel Roca, Business Developer Solar with Panasonic. “Thanks to their special technology, they offer a temperature coefficient of -0,29%/°C – performing considerably better at high temperatures than other, conventional crystalline silicon modules“
The energy is used by a local marble factory, an energy intensive industry which the region is famous for. Turkey released new regulations which loosened up license requirements for power generation up to 1 MW, a lesson Australian regulators could learn much from if we are to see more large-scale PV in our country. Turkey currently offers approximately 0,10 €/kWh for any excess that is fed into the grid; slightly higher than what most business pay for electricity according to 2011 statistics we found on European electricity pricing.
Now, to just work out how to get some solar made, Turkish marble into Australia, my backyard and build an eco turkish bath, heated with PVT!
Harika! (Turkish translation for Awesome!)
Post expires at 12:47pm on Sunday December 8th, 2013
The post Turkish marble and solar capacity gets a solar boost appeared first on Solar Business Services.