Tofas, a Turkish carmaker part-owned by Fiat Chrysler, was among those announcing a halt in production on Monday, according to Turkish media, after the government said it would impose three days of power cuts on heavy industrial users this week. Others included Renault's joint venture, which said it
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Tofas, a Turkish carmaker part-owned by Fiat Chrysler, was among those announcing a halt in production on Monday, according to Turkish media, after the government said it would impose three days of power cuts on heavy industrial users this week. Others included Renault''s joint venture, which said it would halt production at its factory in Bursa, in the west of the country, for 15 days from Monday.
The outages, which risk stoking Turkey''s already soaring inflation and hitting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan''s export targets, come after Iran — which provides around 10 per cent of Turkey''s natural gas — last week announced that it would temporarily suspend gas exports to its neighbour because of technical problems.
The drop in supply, combined with high demand for energy as cold weather and snow have swept the country, has put heavy pressure on the power network in a country where more than half of electricity is produced in gas-fired power stations.
"It''s an extraordinary shortage for Turkey," said Emre Erturk, founder of the Istanbul-based consultancy Energy IQ. "This kind of country-wide curtailment plan has never been adopted for this long."
The decision was met with dismay by Turkish manufacturers, who complained they were given little notice of being forced to halt production this week — with power outages affecting different provinces on different days.
"It will have consequences in terms of export growth," said Ozlem Derici Sengul, the founder of the Istanbul-based Spinn Consultancy. "If it does not stay as a one-time shock, we may have to revise our overall growth estimates down."
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Tehran oil minister Javad Owji said at the weekend that Turkey had urged Iran to continue gas exports and postpone repair operations. "But considering that it was risky and could cause incidents, we had no other choice but to bring down the [gas] pressure and exports," Owji told local media. "Based on our contract and safety issues, we have to fix the leak at the first possible opportunity. But the cold weather made us postpone it for a few days. This problem definitely needs to be resolved while we see this as a matter of principle."
In a telephone conversation on Saturday, Erdogan told President Ebrahim Raisi that Turkey considered its neighbour a "reliable source of energy", according to Iranian media. No further details were given.
Erturk, the energy analyst, said that while Ankara had made significant efforts to increase its gas importing capacity in recent years, it had failed to renew critical long-term contracts that expired last year with Russia and Azerbaijan.
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Turkey is undergoing massive power cuts to industrial customers this week at an unprecedented level never seen before after the country''s natural gas supplies dipped following a disruption of imports from Iran. Major industrial zones and clusters and major production sites, including those of foreign car manufacturers, are being hit by power outages after Iran said at the end of last week it would halt natural gas exports to Turkey for ten days, due to technical issues.
On Friday, Iran announced that gas flows were restored, but Turkey said supplies were very low and at low pressure.
