Turkey “has doubled its solar capacity in just 2.5 years,” reports Ember. Its “solar energy capacity doubled from 9.7 GW in July 2022 to exceed 19 GW by the end of 2024.” It achieved “this target 1.5 years ahead of schedule,” illustrating Turkey’s “strong commitment to solar energy…Unlicensed plants, primarily built for self-consumption, accounted for 90% of new installations in the past four years…The previous doubling of solar energy capacity required more than four years between 2018 and 2022.”
This doubling of solar capacity is significant, because it will reduce Turkey’s heavy reliance on Russian oil and gas. Unlike neighboring Iran, which is one of the world’s largest oil producers, Turkey has almost no oil and gas of its own. As Wikipedia notes, “Natural gas supplies over a quarter of Turkey’s energy. The country consumes 50 to 60 billion cubic metres of this natural gas each year, nearly all of which is imported…After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine began, several European countries stopped buying Russian oil or gas, but” Turkey “continues to buy both. Turkey receives almost half of its gas from Russia.” Gas “supplies half the country’s heating requirements.”
Solar energy is also expanding in the U.S., but it took from 2019 to 2023 to double, a longer period than it took to double in Turkey.
Other forms of energy will be needed to provide steady, reliable power. Geothermal energy may radically expand due to technological advances, just as oil and gas production in the U.S. rose to record levels after fracking techniques were perfected. Last year, The Economist reported:
George Mitchell, a scrappy independent oilman, is known as the father of fracking. Nearly three decades ago, he defied Big Oil and the conventional wisdom of his industry by making practical the hitherto uneconomic technique of pumping liquids and sands into the ground to force out gas and oil from shale rock and other tight geological formations. The enormous increase in productivity that resulted, known as the shale revolution, has transformed the global hydrocarbon business.
Now Fervo Energy, another scrappy Texan upstart, is applying such hydraulic fracturing—alongside other techniques borrowed from the petroleum industry—to the sleepy geothermal sector. Should it succeed, it would mean this relatively fringe source of energy could, in time, become a major player in the energy mix.
Nuclear energy produces steady, reliable power, unlike solar and wind energy, which only work when the sun is shining or there is wind.
Right now, nuclear energy produces around 20% of the electricity generated in America. Nuclear energy produces no greenhouse gas emissions or air pollution. Nuclear plants generate most electric power in countries like France and Slovakia, but in the U.S., it has been much more difficult and costly to construct a nuclear power plant. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission makes it very expensive to construct a nuclear plant — even the application process is incredibly expensive and usually takes years of unnecessary delay. Even when nuclear plants are already operating safely and providing badly needed power, anti-nuclear activists sometimes get government officials to shut them down. Recently, however, the NRC approved the construction of a nuclear plant with an innovative design and a non-water cooled reactor.
A recent study found that nuclear power is better for the environment than wind energy, solar power, or fossil fuels. “Solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste,” such as “dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.”
