Investigation of the relationship between renewable energy, natural gas, and coal consumption with economic growth in Turkey: evidence from augmented ARDL approach

Energy is an indispensable requirement for the sustainable development of countries. Turkey has been trying to increase the use of renewable sources in electricity energy production with the policies it has implemented recently. This study investigates the effect of disaggregate energy consumption on economic growth in Turkey via the Augmented ARDL. Robust results are obtained by Augmented ARDL in econometric analysis. In this context, it is to examine the impact of renewable energy, natural gas, and coal consumption. Considering the 2001 crisis in Turkey, we add a dummy variable to the cointegration equation. The paper employs the recently developed augmented ARDL approach in the presence of one structural break to investigate annual time series data during the period 1988–2018. The results obtained in this study showed that all variables were statistically significant eventually. Long-term estimation results suggest that among the energy sources examined in the study, on economic growth has a positive effect coal consumption, natural gas consumption, and renewable energy. Moreover, empirical results indicated that economic growth and energy consumption also contribute to environmental damage. On the contrary, natural gas both increases economic growth and is effective in increasing environmental quality. The fact that the positive effect of renewable energy sources on economic growth eventually is greater than natural gas is the most striking finding of the study. In line with these results, it can be said that Turkey can reduce its energy dependence by increasing the use of domestic and renewable energy sources and providing sustainable economic growth.