Türkiye is urging the world to electrify before it hosts November’s COP31 summit, even as coal still grips the country’s electricity grid.
In a Project Syndicate essay published in late June, Murat Kurum, Türkiye’s environment minister and president-designate of COP31, argued that a summer of oil-price shocks had handed the world a chance to make fossil fuels “superfluous”. His summit opens in Antalya on November 9 and runs for 11 days, preceded by a leaders’ gathering in Fiji and a pre-COP meeting in Tuvalu, with Australia’s Chris Bowen chairing the negotiations track. Its centrepiece is ’35 by 35′, a pledge to lift electricity’s share of final energy demand from around 20 per cent today to 35 per cent by 2035.
Kurum has been making the same pitch on the road. At a St James’s Palace gathering during London Climate Action Week on June 24, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, called methane a “super super-pollutant” and pressed governments to end routine gas flaring. Ed Miliband, Britain’s energy secretary and its likely next chancellor, hosted the session. Kurum, standing alongside them, confirmed that Antalya would be an “implementation COP,” with methane cuts and the circular economy sitting next to electrification on the agenda.
Closer to home
Back in Türkiye, the numbers tell a different story. Ufuk Alparslan, Ember‘s regional lead for Türkiye and the Caucasus, called it “a huge moment” in 2024, when wind and solar first overtook domestic coal generation. By April 2026, when Ember published its next annual review, the picture had turned more equivocal. Coal remained the country’s largest single power source, at 34 per cent of generation, two-thirds of it imported. Wind and solar reached a combined 22 per cent, edging past hydropower for the first time, but annual capacity additions of 6.5 gigawatts still fall short of the 8 gigawatts needed to hit the 2035 target.
Hugh Williamson, Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia director, warned in July 2025 that Turkish authorities had failed to weigh the health costs of expanding Afşin-Elbistan A, a coal plant in Kahramanmaraş that Çelikler Holding has operated since 2018. An independent expert panel agreed two months later, ruling that two proposed new units served no public interest. A second panel repeated the verdict in February 2026, judging the environmental assessment inadequate on seven of nine counts, and protesters gathered outside the plant that April. Mehmet Dalkanat, from a local campaign group fighting the expansion, put the toll more starkly: “There isn’t a single household in Elbistan without cancer.”
Alparslan Bayraktar, the energy minister, has pressed on regardless. In September 2025 he announced a state-guaranteed price of 7.5 cents per kilowatt-hour for domestic coal plants, with new facilities eligible for guarantees until 2045. Ember puts the four-year cost of the scheme at 8.7 billion US dollars. Bayraktar defended the policy bluntly at a briefing in May, telling reporters that protecting 30,000 mining jobs came first and that “employment comes first for those families.”
Ember’s own costing of the same coal fleet, published alongside the subsidy announcement, put domestic lignite generation at 53 to 86 US dollars per megawatt-hour depending on the plant. New solar contracts, by contrast, were already 15 to 21 per cent cheaper than existing imported or domestic coal respectively. Solar became Türkiye’s cheapest source of power sometime in 2025, the same year the state locked in higher guaranteed prices for coal.
Emissions rising
Türkiye’s paperwork tells a similar story to its power plants. The country’s most recent climate pledge to the UN, submitted in September 2025, projects emissions rising in absolute terms through 2035 rather than falling. A domestic climate law that took effect that July set no date for phasing out fossil fuels and created no independent body to check progress against it. Neither document mentions the coal purchase guarantees signed two months apart. Kurum’s government has also not joined the pledge agreed by more than 130 countries at COP28 in Dubai, in December 2023, to triple global renewable capacity by 2030, a step several campaign groups tracking COP31’s preparations have urged him to take before he chairs the summit.
There is a more encouraging story running alongside the coal one. Ember reported in June that renewable generation in the first five months of 2026 rose 32 per cent year-on-year to 87 terawatt-hours, a 26-year high, helped by unusually heavy rainfall that pushed hydropower output to a record. Wholesale electricity prices fell to their lowest level since Türkiye’s market was established in 2011, saving the government 746 million US dollars in subsidy payments. Türkiye’s approved battery pipeline, meanwhile, has reached 33 gigawatts, roughly three times the combined capacity and pipeline of the largest EU electricity markets.
Antalya’s delegates will arrive in November carrying the same ’35 by 35′ slogan Kurum has been promoting since June. They will also be able to open Ember’s monthly bulletins and see, in the same period, whether coal generation set the fresh record its own energy ministry expects.
Photo: Dreamstime.