Europe gets its largest solar power plant with 1.35 GW capacity in Turkey’s Karapinar region after Kalyon Enerji’s Karapinar Solar Plant was officially inaugurated recently in a ceremony attended by the country’s President Tayyip Erdoğan.

With 1,347.734 MW DC/1,000 MW AC capacity, the project is the country’s largest single sited PV facility. It uses solar modules produced within Turkey by Kalyon PV in a 500 MW integrated monocrystalline ingot-wafer-cells-module fab (see 500 MW Wafer-To Panel Fab Opens In Turkey).

It uses around 3.5 million solar panels that are designed to produce close to 3 billion kWh electricity annually. Turkey’s Energy and Natural Resources Minister Fatih Donmez said this is enough to meet the electricity needs of 2 million people.

Kalyon says the project having come up in a desert region is ‘poised to single-handedly increase the share of solar power among total renewables by 20%’. It has come online for an investment of $1 billion out of which £217 million was lent by UK Export Finance (see Finance For Turkey’s Largest Solar Facility).

It increases the country’s total installed solar energy capacity by 20%, claims Kalyon.