A New Era for Unlicensed Electricity Producers

The Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EPDK) announced that, in the new era beginning in the electricity sector with aggregation activities, the way has been opened for the output of unlicensed power plants to be combined so that they can operate like a large generation facility.

In a written statement, the authority recalled that the 2022 amendment to the electricity market legislation defined the aggregator and aggregation as a licensed electricity market activity. It said the aim is to ensure reliability for the grid users in aggregators’ portfolios and to enable the market operator to carry out processes such as market registration, collateral, settlement, payment and enforcement more soundly.

The statement defined aggregation as the activity of investors who hold an aggregation licence from EPDK drawing up consumption or generation schedules with the grid users they have contracted, making small-scale consumers and producers available for supply and system security, playing a role in grid balancing, and buying and selling electrical energy on behalf of these users. The statement went on to say:

“The aggregator model will provide important benefits for grid users who want to offer demand flexibility to the market but are not familiar with market rules, registration and transaction procedures in the markets, or pre-qualification for services, who cannot finance the infrastructure needed to participate in the markets, or who are reluctant to manage trading risks in the markets on their own. The deterrent factors in this area can be removed, financial advantages will be provided, and the opportunity will arise to activate demand flexibility in the markets.”

With their information technology and energy management infrastructure, aggregators will be able to evaluate together the generation forecasts for distributed energy resources, electricity prices in the wholesale markets and data on the supply-demand balance in the system.

In this way, they will be able to operate their portfolios, which consist of grid users of different types and scales and are described as a kind of “virtual energy source”, at an optimum level, and will contribute to the flexibility required for integrating renewable energy into the grid.

Consumers, for their part, will be able to contribute to the production-consumption balance by reducing their consumption at specified hours, and to offer various services under the name of “demand-side participation” in developed markets.

Noting that Türkiye has around 14,500 megawatts of unlicensed electricity generation, the statement said:

“The owners of these facilities, the vast majority of which are SPPs built to meet their own consumption, will be able to join forces and act as a single power plant of, for example, 50 megawatts, 100 megawatts or 300 megawatts. In this way, small-scale generation facilities that cannot operate alone in markets such as the balancing power market will come together to become market players like large generation facilities, paving the way for our renewable energy resources to be used more efficiently.”