Since the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz in late February 2026, close to 20% of global LNG supply has been removed from the market, triggering sharp price increases across key importing regions and reversing a trend of market rebalancing that had characterized the 2025/26 heating season.
European TTF benchmark futures reached $14.80 per million British thermal units for the week ending April 24, 35% above pre-closure levels. EU gas storage levels have fallen below 30%, nearly 20 percentage points down from a year earlier, underscoring Europe’s vulnerability to further supply shocks. Against that backdrop, the decision by Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Bulgaria to establish a joint company for a green electricity transmission corridor from the Caspian basin to European markets is a logical policy response. Whether it is a timely one is a different question.
The four countries reached their institutional agreement at a ministerial meeting in Istanbul on May 23, 2026, the third such gathering since the initiative was first discussed at an Istanbul energy forum in May 2025. The joint company, to be established by the four countries’ transmission system operators, will manage a technical feasibility study and coordinate project implementation. The feasibility work is described as already underway, with completion expected within months. That timeline is plausible for a study. It is considerably less plausible as a proxy for when electrons will actually flow.
The project envisions renewable electricity generated in Azerbaijan and Georgia being transmitted through Türkiye’s national grid to Bulgaria’s interconnection points and onward into wider European electricity markets, with Azerbaijan planning to develop more than 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity and intending to export around 4,000 megawatts to European markets. Those figures require significant qualification. Azerbaijan currently has contracts to commission 6 GW of wind and solar capacity by 2030 and 8 GW by 2032. As of 2025, the country has launched several utility-scale projects, including the 230 MW Garadagh solar plant and the 240 MW Shafag Solar Power Plant, currently under construction, with a government target of generating 30% of electricity from renewables by 2030. The gap between current installed renewable capacity and the export ambitions embedded in the corridor project is therefore substantial, and the timeline for closing it is compressed.
This is not a criticism unique to Azerbaijan. The corridor’s ambition is explicitly forward-looking, premised on generation capacity that does not yet exist being transmitted through infrastructure that has not yet been built or upgraded, to markets whose import frameworks remain to be defined. That is not a reason to dismiss the project, but it is a reason to read the institutional progress made in Istanbul as the beginning of a long engineering and regulatory process rather than as a near-term energy security solution.
Türkiye’s role in the project carries particular analytical weight. Türkiye occupies a dual position, acting both as a transit country for electricity moving toward Europe and as a destination market able to draw on the corridor’s capacity domestically. The Turkish Electricity Transmission Corporation, TEIAŞ, signed an operational cooperation agreement with Azerbaijan’s Azerenerji in April 2025, providing institutional grounding for the transit arrangement. Under that existing agreement, the Nakhchivan connection currently carries 75 megawatts of import capacity and 40 megawatts of export capacity. Scaling that to a corridor targeting 4,000 megawatts of export volume represents a transmission infrastructure challenge of a different order of magnitude entirely.
Ankara has presented this corridor as part of a broader energy hub strategy that encompasses gas, LNG, electricity, renewables, nuclear, and critical minerals. On the same day as the Istanbul ministerial, state pipeline operator BOTAŞ signed a memorandum of understanding with Italy’s Edison S.p.A. on potential cooperation in natural gas and LNG, including a possible hydrogen-ready gas interconnection between Türkiye and Italy. The framing is internally coherent from a Turkish foreign policy perspective: Ankara positions itself as the connector between Caspian and Gulf producers and European consumers, leveraging geography as a strategic asset at a moment when European supply chain vulnerability is acute. The IEA has described the combined impacts of Hormuz-related disruptions as the greatest threat to global energy security in history, with short-term supply losses potentially resulting in a cumulative loss of around 120 billion cubic meters of LNG supply between 2026 and 2030. That severity concentrates European minds on alternative routes at a pace that no policy document anticipated.
Bulgaria’s anchor role as the EU entry point gives the corridor regulatory credibility it would otherwise lack. As a NATO and EU member with established grid connections into central and southeastern European markets, Bulgaria provides the interface with the broader ENTSO-E network. A joint venture linked to a related Azerbaijani-led project has already been submitted for inclusion in the ENTSO-E Ten-Year Network Development Plan, a critical step toward obtaining Projects of Common Interest or Projects of Mutual Interest status in the EU. PCI or PMI designation would unlock access to EU permitting streamlining and potentially to European infrastructure financing, materially improving the project’s funding profile. Whether the four-country corridor established in Istanbul pursues the same regulatory pathway or a parallel track remains to be clarified.
The Zangazur dimension adds geopolitical complexity. The framework includes a connection through Nakhchivan and potential links through the Zangazur Corridor toward Central Asian energy flows. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan have been advancing plans to export renewable electricity to Europe through a separate Green Corridor project, with Uzbekistan having commissioned solar and wind plants totaling 5,582 MW, generating 10.5 billion kilowatt-hours from these sources in 2025. If the four-country corridor can eventually serve as the western segment of a longer Caspian-to-Europe transmission spine, the aggregate volume of potential export capacity grows substantially. That possibility is currently at the conceptual stage, but it explains why Azerbaijan’s framing of the Istanbul agreement emphasizes corridor architecture rather than simply bilateral electricity trade.
The electricity transmission approach holds structural advantages over pipeline alternatives in one important respect. Unlike oil and gas pipelines, which require dedicated civil engineering for each new commodity stream, electricity corridors can draw on existing grid assets and upgrade them incrementally, with the feasibility study determining how much new transmission infrastructure is required and at what cost. That flexibility is operationally significant when the primary constraint is capital deployment speed rather than technical feasibility. It also means that partial builds have value, whereas a gas pipeline either reaches its destination or it does not.
What the Istanbul agreement has not yet produced is a capitalization plan, an incorporation timeline for the joint company, or a public cost estimate for the required transmission upgrades. Those omissions are not unusual at this stage of a multilateral infrastructure project, but they are the variables on which delivery timelines ultimately depend. Europe’s energy security calculus has shifted sharply since February 2026, and the political will behind this corridor is correspondingly stronger than it would have been eighteen months ago. Converting that political will into energized electrons reaching Bulgarian interconnection points is a problem that the feasibility study now underway will need to begin answering in concrete engineering and financial terms.
