ASELSAN Commissions Solar Plants to Power Its Factories
ASELSAN has switched on two new solar power plants that the company says now cover all the electricity consumed by its production lines, General Manager Ahmet Akyol told Anadolu Agency on November 9. The move makes Türkiye’s largest defence electronics manufacturer one of the first in the country’s defence sector to run its factory floor entirely on renewable power it generates itself.
Akyol did not disclose the generating capacity of the two new plants, their exact locations, or a commissioning date beyond saying they are now operational. ASELSAN has not published a formal press release on the plants as of this writing; the figures below come from Akyol’s remarks to Anadolu Agency, carried by Türkiye Today.
Built on a Delayed 2023 Plan
The announcement builds on a project ASELSAN first disclosed in February 2023, when it said it was building a 75-megawatt solar facility to cover the annual electricity needs of its campuses in Ankara, where most of its production and engineering staff are based. That plant was originally expected to enter service in 2024. Whether the two plants Akyol referred to this week are that same facility, a successor project, or an expanded version was not specified.
What is new in this week’s announcement is the hardware. Akyol said the plants mark the first use of ASELSAN’s own PULSAR solar inverters, the devices that convert the direct current a solar array produces into the alternating current a factory or the grid actually uses. ASELSAN had described its PULSAR string inverter, rated at 250 kilowatts, as the highest-output photovoltaic inverter designed and built domestically in Türkiye when it unveiled the product in 2023. Fielding it at scale on the company’s own production sites gives ASELSAN a reference installation it can point to when marketing the inverter to Turkish utility-scale solar developers, a market currently dominated by imported power electronics.
Energy Security for a Growing Order Book
ASELSAN frames the solar push as part of a broader sustainability push rather than a one-off project. Akyol said the company has been growing revenue by more than 25% a year on average and currently has roughly $3 billion in investment underway, without breaking down how much of that figure covers energy infrastructure versus production capacity and new facilities. He said the company aims to keep its position at the top of Türkiye’s Sustainability Index and noted ASELSAN was the first Turkish organization to receive the Blue Water Efficiency Certificate, a corporate water-stewardship credential. He put the plants’ annual emissions saving at roughly 121,000 tons of carbon dioxide, a figure the company compared to the yearly absorption capacity of about 4 million trees; neither figure could be independently verified.
For a company sitting on an order backlog that topped $30 billion for the first time at the end of September and that just disclosed a $1.1 billion air defence export contract, energy self-sufficiency is also a practical hedge. Defence manufacturers that run continuous production lines for radars, missile seekers, and electronic warfare systems are exposed to grid price swings and, in a NATO frontline state like Türkiye, to the risk that transmission infrastructure becomes a target in a crisis. Turkish officials have made that argument explicitly when discussing solar power for military and defence-industrial sites, framing distributed generation as a way to keep production running if centralized power delivery is disrupted.
Why It Matters Beyond Türkiye
The announcement is unlikely to move ASELSAN’s order book on its own, but it speaks to a dimension of competitiveness that increasingly matters to the company’s customers. European defence ministries and primes have been adding sustainability and supply-chain resilience criteria to procurement and partnership decisions, and a manufacturer that can document falling emissions and energy independence has an easier case to make in those conversations than one that cannot. It also reinforces a theme ASELSAN has leaned on in its export pitch: that Turkish defence production is not merely cost-competitive but increasingly self-sufficient across the supply chain, from the seeker heads inside its latest naval optronics to the power that runs the assembly line.
ASELSAN’s own account of the plants is, for now, the only public record of the project’s current scope. The company has not said whether it plans to replicate the approach at its other campuses outside Ankara, or whether the PULSAR inverter will be offered commercially to Turkish solar developers beyond ASELSAN’s own use.
