Abstract
Turkey’s electricity mix is dominated by fossil fuels, but the country has ambitious future targets for renewable and nuclear energy. At present, environmental impacts of electricity generation in Turkey are unknown so this paper represents a first attempt to fill this knowledge gap. Taking a life cycle approach, the study considers eleven impacts from electricity generation over the period 1990–2014. All 516 power plants currently operational in Turkey are assessed: lignite, hard coal, natural gas, hydro, onshore wind and geothermal. The results show that the annual impacts from electricity have been going up steadily over the period, increasing by 2–9 times, with the global warming potential being higher by a factor of five. This is due to a four-fold increase in electricity demand and a growing share of fossil fuels. The impact trends per unit of electricity generated differ from those for the annual impacts, with only four impacts being higher today than in 1990, including the global warming potential. Most other impacts are lower from 35% to two times. These findings demonstrate the need for diversifying the electricity mix by increasing the share of domestically-abundant renewable resources, such as geothermal, wind, and solar energy.
Highlights
With its young population, fast growing economy and industrialisation, Turkey has become one of the fastest growing energy markets in the world
Only 43% of the demand is met by domestic energy resources with the rest of electricity generated by imported fuels [4]
The life cycle environmental impacts of different electricity generation options in Turkey are compared in Figure 3 and in Tables S8–S18 in Supplementary information
Summary
Fast growing economy and industrialisation, Turkey has become one of the fastest growing energy markets in the world. The contribution of hydropower close to that of oil coal, providing around quarter over of electricity years, and theoretically-viable today almost no oil power plants remain in Turkey, as is most have been converted to [8] Almost half of this is technically and nearly 30% economically exploitable [8]. The only exception is the previous work by Atilgan and Azapagic [12,13], but that only considered electricity from individual technologies rather than the whole electricity supply mix which is the focus of this work This is the first study of its kind for Turkey and the findings will provide an insight into the past trends and current environmental impacts of electricity generation, helping to identify opportunities for improving the environmental sustainability of the sector. The same method has been applied in the current study, which considers 11 environmental categories, as discussed
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