ISTANBUL - The billboards on the airport road were hard to miss

ISTANBUL — The billboards on the airport road were hard to miss: large red placards from Akbank proclaiming that “Sustainability is our favorite topic.” The Turkish bank's intended audience? Investors, bankers and delegates arriving for the annual meetings earlier this month of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

But some investors in renewable energy projects say they are troubled by a more disagreeable topic: slowness by Turkey's government in moving to privatize its energy markets and take advantage of its capacity for generating wind power.

In 2005, Turkey passed a Renewable Energy Law to bring the country more in line with European Union regulations. But the tariff structure offering a government guarantee of about 5 euro cents per kilowatt hour is widely seen as discouraging to investors because the rate is lower than in most European countries.

A proposed revision of the 2005 law is now before Parliament in Ankara and could improve the system, investors say, helping to release the backlog of applications to build wind farms. Opening the market “would allow small wind farms to proliferate and lead to development of regional power production,” said Murat Ozakat, managing partner in Mitra, a wind and real estate investment company based in Alacati on the Aegean coast. Turkey, which relies heavily on imported natural gas from Russia, “could produce 35 percent of its energy from hydro, 25 percent from wind, 10 percent from geothermal and the rest from gas and oil, but instead, today it's the opposite,” Mr. Ozakat said during a recent interview.

“Turkey pays $50 billion a year to other countries for oil, gas, coal and electricity, and by 2023 it will be $100 billion if we don't act now,” he said. “But to develop these sectors, we need longer-term credit and incentives from the government. This is a national security issue.”

It is also a sector in which people hope to make money. The amount of wind power installed in Turkey nearly tripled in 2008 and was set to expand further this year. Energy and Natural Resources Minister Taner Yildiz said at a renewable energy conference in Ankara, the capital, this month that his government was “resolute” about expanding renewable energy sources.

That is good news for Turkish companies trying to increase their share of the renewables market. Agaoglu Group, for example, recently purchased Galata Wind, a unit of the Dutch-Italian company Relight. Bloomberg News said Galata operated three wind farms with a total capacity of 203 megawatts and put the value of the deal at $500 million.

The largest single wind project in Turkey is the Gokcedag Wind Farm in Osmaniye, in southern Turkey between the cities Adana and Gaziantep. There, Rotor Elektrik, a member of Zorlu Energy Group, is installing 54 turbines built by General Electric. The project is designed to raise Turkey's current 500 megawatt wind energy capacity by about 30 percent. Turkey's potential for wind power generation, according to its Energy Ministry, is 48,000 megawatts.

Financing for the €210 million, or $313 million, project comes from a blend of lenders. The International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group, is providing €55 million; the European Investment Bank is lending €30 million; and additional guarantees are coming from HSBC and DenizBank.

The Osmaniye wind farm is also the first project in Turkey to have the support of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which decided to redirect some of its lending capacity to Turkey, the sixth largest electricity market in Europe, at a time when the debt crisis was slowing the process of privatization. The EBRD added Turkey to its portfolio a year ago and provided a €45 million construction loan for the Osmaniye farm.

Murat Sungur Bursa, Zorlu's chief executive, said during an interview that capacity at Osmaniye, when fully operational, will be close to 500 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year.

“We also plan to expand with two more projects to be developed next year in the same region,” he said, adding 110 more turbines to produce 245 megawatts of energy. The power, he said, would be sold to the Turkish national grid.

But like Turkey's hydroelectric dam projects, expansion of the wind sector provokes some concerns among environmentalists.

Guven Eken, president of Doga Dernegi, the Turkish Nature Association, said it would be a mistake to interpret advances in wind projects as an outgrowth of a “proper energy policy in Turkey.”

“Currently the country is opening doors to all kinds of energy — nuclear, hydro, megadams, wind, geothermal — but the way in which the government is pursuing the energy issue is like a panic atmosphere,” Mr. Eken said. “It is trying to invest in all sectors at the same time, at the maximum limit, without taking into account the environmental considerations resulting from these huge investments. There's not an energy policy but rather an energy rush.”

While wind energy may be cleaner than other forms of energy in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, “it may be quite harmful for the wild bird population, and the area around Osmaniye is a key bottleneck area for migratory birds,” Mr. Eken said. “This doesn't mean that the wind power will be definitely harmful, but that the issue does require proper investigation and assessments on biodiversity.”

Meanwhile, the investor Mr. Ozakat sees wind energy as a boon for the Turks themselves.

“This field has huge potential for the young people of Turkey in terms of jobs and cleaner air,” he said. “First we had the industrial boom, then the banking boom. I believe that the next big growth in Turkey will happen with the renewable energy sector. After all, everybody needs energy.”