Istanbul has started an extremely ambitious project in committing to expand the City’s own renewable energy supply, by placing floating solar panels on water surfaces by the Büyükçekmece dam, making use of the unused space on the city’s water basins and ponds.
The solar panels will feed electricity into the power grid to be used by the city, replacing the need for fossil fuel intensive energy production and providing greater electricity capacity. The project has been launched in 2016 on a small scale with a capacity of around 240KWp, which then was expanded over the following 3 years to have a total capacity of 10MWp, capable of completely replacing the electricity consumption of 2,400 homes.
