The number of renewable energy generation facilities to be installed in Jeongnam-myeon, Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, by the end of this year is 104. The plan distributes 845kW of solar power across 66 sites and 455kW of geothermal power across 26 sites. Annual generation is projected at 1,769,910kWh, approved as a scale that replaces 341.73toe of fossil energy. The average capacity per site is not large, but the fact that the facilities are dispersed into the village defines the character of this project.
Hwaseong City held a signing ceremony on the 20th at the Hwaseong Sports Town for a consortium agreement on the renewable energy convergence support project. The agreement covers the roles and composition of the participating organizations, the project details, and the maintenance arrangements together. What stands out is that maintenance was fixed at the agreement stage.
Deployment projects usually do not fail right after installation. Failure arrives in the third year, when no one takes responsibility for a broken facility.
Around the same time, a different kind of experiment is under way in Busan. Busan's waters are assessed as having an average annual wind speed of about 7m per second and depth conditions suited to offshore wind. On top of these conditions, a shift in the development method from the existing private-sector-centered approach to a public-led one is being pursued, and the Dadaepo offshore wind project has been presented as the first case. The installed capacity, project cost, and construction start date have not been disclosed.
Concerns are being raised over the Busan offshore wind project regarding noise and vibration, effects on the marine ecosystem, fishing rights, and damage to the landscape. None of these are items that can be answered by technology alone. Busan City is understood to plan to secure public acceptance by gathering residents' opinions through a regional council and sharing the course of the project.
On the 21st in Gwanghwamun, Seoul, the "Seminar on Measures to Expand Renewable Energy Deployment in Coexistence with Local Communities," hosted by the Energy Transition Forum and sponsored by the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment and the Korea Energy Agency, was held. The overseas cases cited at the seminar pointed to one thing. The number of permits for agrivoltaics in Japan rose from 3,474 in 2020 to 5,351 in 2025, and the United States has introduced a cumulative 10GW across 596 agrivoltaic projects, of which 7.8GW is resident-participation type.
The ratio in the U.S. figures is especially telling. It means about 78% of total capacity takes a form in which residents participate. Italy is pursuing the "EMERA" project, which incorporates agrivoltaics into microgrids with the goal of energy independence at the farm level. It is an approach that does not stop at placing generation facilities on farmland but builds in the stage where the farm itself uses that electricity.
At the seminar, Choi Jae-bin, a policy activist at Solutions for Our Climate, pointed to regulatory and standards issues such as setback distances, rather than technology or cost, as the key bottleneck in renewable energy deployment. This diagnosis is more useful when read in reverse. If regulation is the bottleneck, what created that regulation was usually the distrust left behind by earlier projects. Public acceptance is a problem at the stage before regulation, and regulation is closer to a mark left after acceptance has collapsed.
So Busan's public-led transition and Hwaseong's consortium-style deployment, projects of different scales, prompt the same question. It is where the benefits flow. The total project cost, the share borne by residents, and the profit-sharing method for the Hwaseong project have yet to be announced. Depending on whether it is a simple installation subsidy or a method that shares revenue, the meaning of a figure like 104 sites changes considerably.
The points to watch are clear. For Hwaseong, the end of this year is the deadline for completing installation, and for Busan, the moment the operator and scale of the Dadaepo project are disclosed becomes the baseline for assessment. If you hear that a renewable energy project is coming to your area, what to ask before installed capacity is how many seats residents hold on the council. That number ultimately determines how many years the project will last.
