Turkey's potential in terms of renewable energy resources and strategies to mobilize this potential

Renewable energy has strategic importance in terms of consumption and production for Turkey, due to its domestic, reliable, clean and environment-friendly nature. Renewable energy resources' domestic qualification and low production costs cause renewable energy resources to be important alternatives in energy production for further utilization. Countries need eternal, continuous, reliable and clean energy in order to increase international competitiveness and maintain a stronger economical development. Turkey imports huge amounts of fuel such as petroleum and natural gas for energy use. Hence, new and renewable energies become crucial for Turkey, which desires nonvolatile growth. In our research, we claim that for maintaining contemporary, clean, reliable, peaceful, healthy and survivable world renewable energy is a necessity and with the increasing population, urbanization and advanced technology, energy demand will continue to increase. Rather than using mostly fossil fuel based energy in order to satisfy energy demand in our contemporary daily life, it is announced that we should increase the usage of renewable energies, which are environment-friendly, no harmful effect on climate change, and lead to decrease economic dependence in terms of energy. Increasing energy imports and correlatively, increasing economic dependence in terms of energy power had played an important role in Turkey's current account deficit to become chronic. For the aim of decreasing energy dependence more emphasis has to be put on renewable energy sources, along with decreasing energy density through acceptable austerity strategy for the sake of increasing energy efficiency.