The Czech energy group Energo-Pro has completed the Alpaslan 2 hydroelectric power plant in Turkey. The total price was around $ 600 million (approximately 12.8 billion crowns), which is the most significant Czech investment in hydropower since 1989.
Alpaslan 2 became the largest hydroelectric power plant of the group. The source has a total installed capacity of 280 megawatts (MW), is equipped with two turbines with an output of 110 MW and two with an output of 30 MW. “This is an ideal distribution from the point of view of optimizing energy production so that we can make full use of the dam’s potential and the minimum ecological flow,” said Jakub Fajfr, Director of Strategy and Development at Energo-Pro.
The new dam with the Alpaslan 2 hydroelectric power plant is located on the Murat River in the east. The dam’s water area is 55 square kilometers, making it the largest dam in Turkey run by a private investor and one of the ten largest dams in the country. For comparison, the largest domestic dam Lipno has about 49 square kilometers with an installed capacity of about 120 MW.
The impellers of the giant turbines of the Alpaslan 2 power plant have a diameter of 3800 millimeters (mm), of the small ones 1960 mm. According to the company, the technical interest is that the large impellers were made as one large casting – a monoblock and subsequently machined. These are the largest impellers of the Francis turbine in Turkey produced by this method, said Hikelová.
The company began construction of the dam in September 2018 and completed it in two years. The volume of the dam body is 9.05 million cubic meters. It was built 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and up to 1,900 workers took part in the construction.
Energo-Pro financed the construction mainly from its resources. The final phase of the building used $ 175 million (about 3.7 billion crowns) from the consortium of Mitsubishi Bank (MUFG) and the state Czech Export Bank with insurance from the state Export Guarantee and Insurance Company EGAP. “This is a unique success of a Czech investor abroad, moreover in the field of green energy. This project is also unique in the financing model when the international bank MUFG was the leader of the bank club for the first time,” said EGAP CEO Jan Procházka today.
The Alpaslan 2 power plant was connected to the grid last October, after the successful installation of the first Francis turbine. Energo-Pro has thus met all the conditions for obtaining a guaranteed dollar tariff, which has been in force since the beginning of this year for the first ten years of the plant’s operation.
The company Energo-Pro was founded in 1994 in Svitavy. Following the connection of the new Turkish power plants Karakurt and Alpaslan 2, the group owns and operates 38 hydropower plants in four countries – Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic. In addition to hydropower, it distributes and sells electricity and operates distribution networks in Bulgaria and Georgia with more than two million customers.
