A Turkish company specializing in floating power plants claims to be in negotiations with Ukraine to alleviate its pressing energy needs. Karpowership, which has the largest fleet of its kind in the world, with 36 generator ships, reportedly offered state-owned Ukrenergo to moor three of them in Odessa, on the Black Sea.
The company, a subsidiary of the Turkish holding Karadeniz, promises to feed the Ukrainian network in three weeks, if it receives the green light. Initially, with 300 MW, for one million people.
In any case, the executive Zeynep Harezi has declared to Nikkei Asia that the realization is conditional on some type of international agreement that guarantees the safety of personnel and facilities. Surely with the mediation of the UN, as is the case with the agreement for the transit of Ukrainian grain.
In other words, the Russian military, which has knocked out half the Ukrainian power grid in recent weeks through missile and drone attacks, should commit to respecting Turkish ships.
It should be remembered that when Cuban President Miguel Canel-Díaz visited Turkey last week, he had special thanks for the Turkish floating generators, which on the island are called "patanas." The first of them arrived in 2019, until adding three in the bay of Havana and three more in the bay of Mariel, until covering between 20% and 35% of Cuba's electricity supply. There, the twelve-hour-a-day blackouts are not the product of any war, but of an inefficient economic system, aggravated by the US blockade.
The seventh generator ship has arrived this month in Cuba, from the Dominican Republic. Although Karpowership was awarded a contract in Santo Domingo, the delays in the land connection on the Dominican side would have advised the Turkish company to write off the ships in the sister Antilles. These delays could be related to both mandatory environmental reports and neighborhood resistance. In Cuba, on the contrary, blackouts are one of the main reasons for popular discontent.
Karadeniz operates in a total of a dozen countries, generally impoverished. Its first mission, in fact, was in troubled Iraq in 2010. Since then it has made great progress, especially in Africa, where it supplies 100% of the electricity in Guinea Bissau, 80% in Sierra Leone, 60% in Gambia, 26% in Ghana, 23% in Mozambique or 15% in Senegal. It also works on islands in Indonesia and, in the case of Lebanon, contributes one in four kilowatts.
Its fleet of rental generators operates with both diesel and gas and, recently, liquefied gas, through support ships. The same company recently said it was in talks with four European states. However, the mildness of the autumn and full reserves would have postponed any deployment on the continent until winter 2024.
Although the Turkish group claims to have almost half of the ships of this type in the world, reaching this position has not been a bed of roses. Pakistan accused them of not delivering promised benefits and hijacked their ships in Karachi for sixteen months, causing heavy losses. So much so that the international court of arbitration ordered Islamabad to compensate the Turkish company with more than one billion dollars, although a political agreement at the highest level closed the case without compensation.
This year, the problem is in Brazil, south of Rio de Janeiro, due to delays in starting to supply electricity. Faced with the prospect of having to face huge fines, Karpowership alleges that these delays are the product of the Brazilian bureaucracy itself and environmental impact studies, in a sensitive bay, Sepetiba, that have put environmentalists on a war footing.
