Exploring the options for carbon dioxide mitigation in Turkish electric power industry: System dynamics approach

Electric power industry has a huge carbon mitigation potential, fundamentally because there are large carbon-free, renewable resource options. In Turkey, with growing demand in electricity consumption and incentives offered for natural gas fired electricity generation, CO2 emissions sourced from electric power industry had tripled over the last two decades. Current governmental strategy focuses on energy security and resource diversity in a growing economy and does not articulate sufficient mitigation targets and appropriate regulations. In this research, an original dynamic simulation model is built, validated and analyzed to explore the options for carbon mitigation in Turkish electric power industry. Model structure represents the investment, dispatch and pricing heuristics as well as the natural resource base of electricity generation in Turkey. It operates on annual basis over 30 years to simulate installed capacities and generations of power plants with alternative resources and their resulting CO2 emissions. The analysis presented in this paper reveals that there are mitigation options below 50% of business as usual growth, with common policy options such as feed-in-tariffs, investment subsidies and carbon taxes. The model can serve as an experimental platform for further analysis of problems related to carbon mitigation in Turkish electricity sector.