Turkey has made another attempt to undermine the Greece–Cyprus electricity interconnector, with the country’s Energy Minister once again proposing that Ankara should supply the island with electricity.

Turkey’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Alparslan Bayraktar, made the remarks during a meeting with representatives of international news organisations and foreign-language media outlets at Enerji Piyasaları İşletme A.Ş. (Energy Markets Inc.) at the Istanbul Finance Center.

Among other issues, Bayraktar was asked about energy cooperation with Greece.

“As far as cooperation with Greece is concerned, I would be happy to work together. Why not? We are talking about broader cooperation. Let me give you a specific example. Europe is perhaps the only regional community that is vigorously promoting the decarbonisation agenda.

“Let us look at what is happening in Cyprus. It is a small and beautiful island. It relies heavily on fossil fuels to generate electricity, and one of the main problems is the use of heavy fuel oil. To address this, we developed a number of projects. We planned to supply the island with electricity from Turkey by laying an undersea cable,” he said.

Bayraktar said the aim of the project was to transmit electricity generated from renewable sources in Turkey to Cyprus, thereby ending the island’s reliance on power generation from heavy fuel oil-fired plants.

“Greece and Cyprus (the ‘Greek Cypriot Administration of Southern Cyprus’, as the term used by the Turks goes) took the matter to Brussels. Because of Turkey’s connection to the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E), technical approval had to be granted for this new interconnection. A technical issue quickly turned into a political one. Following objections from Greece and the ‘Greek Cypriot Administration of Southern Cyprus’, ENTSO-E stated that it would be unable to approve the creation of this connection,” Bayraktar said.

He added that Turkey had proposed to the Greek Foreign Minister that it could allocate capacity on the undersea electricity interconnector to companies wishing to sell electricity to the ‘Greek Cypriot Administration of Southern Cyprus’.

According to Bayraktar, this would have enabled the island to access cleaner and cheaper electricity, but the proposal was rejected for political reasons.

The Turkish Energy and Natural Resources Minister also said Ankara was planning to build a natural gas pipeline from Turkey to the island. He argued that this would make it possible to generate electricity in Cyprus using cleaner energy sources and, under suitable conditions, sell electricity to its southern part as well.

“This cooperation could benefit both countries. If, in the future, we or someone else discovers natural gas in the Eastern Mediterranean, the pipeline could also be used for reverse flows. Gas could be transported to the island, from there to Turkey and, through Turkey, to the European market. In this way, we would be able to develop an alternative to existing supply routes,” Bayraktar stressed.