Hanwha Q Cells inaugurates Turkish PV factory

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The inauguration ceremony for the 500 MW manufacturing facility took place yesterday.

pv magazine reported on the project earlier last month, when building work initially got underway.

The ceremony was attended by Turkey’s prime minister, Binali Yildirim and the minister for energy and national resources, Berat Albayrak, who happens to be the son in law of the President.

The Ankara-based factory will have an initial capacity of 500 MW, primarily producing the solar panels for Turkey’s 1 GW PV farm in Konya.

In fact, the building of a Turkey-based manufacturing facility was a condition for awarding the Konya project tender to the winners Hanwha Q Cells and Kalyon Enerji.

Discussions with various solar sector stakeholders in the summer revealed doubts as to whether an integrated facility would be built so far from a Turkish port city, due to bad logistics.

But information later showed that the two partners had taken the decision to locate a fully integrated facility in Ankara, Eastern Turkey and endure bad logistics, in order to avoid earthquake risks present in the port regions.

pv magazine has also run a Q&A report on the decision to build a solar PV manufacturing facility in Turkey.

Turkey has set a target of 5 GW of solar PV capacity by 2023. This translates to just 2.7% of the overall projected power capacity of 180 GW by that time.

Turkey’s installed PV capacity in the last two years has reached above 1 GW, mainly via ground mounted systems.

The rooftop segment of the market is the biggest loss, due to a lack of public policies that could boost it.

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