Analyzing The Post-liberalization Dynamics of the Turkish Electricity Supply System

Currently, the Turkish electricity supply system (ESS) is exposed to significant changes in various contexts. On the management side, the system has been going through an institutional transformation from a vertically integrated design to a liberalized one. In short, from now on the Turkish ESS will no longer be a system that is controlled by a single actor (i.e. state), but will be a market in which multiple private actors operate for generation and distribution. Increasing concerns regarding security of fuel supply, and somehow related changes in fuel prices is another contextual factor that has the potential to induce change in this system. Combining all these somehow interrelated recent developments, interventions and market uncertainties, the long-term evolution of a complex large-scale system like Turkish ESS becomes challenging to foresee. However, such a foresight regarding issues such as fuel mix, electricity prices, emission levels, capacity adequacy is vitally important for long-term policy analysis and planning. In that respect this project aims to conduct a detailed scenario and policy analysis in order to explore plausible development trajectories for the Turkish ESS. Such a comprehensive scenario and policy analysis demands a well-structured information base about the Turkish ESS, as well as a good foundation for developing a set of computational policy analysis models. These two instrumental pieces (i.e. an information base on Turkish ESS, and a modeling workbench/framework) address important gaps in the Turkish energy planning and analysis domain, hence they are considered as intermediary objectives of this study.