A public offshore wind operator in Boryeong, South Chungcheong Province, asked when it could begin putting power onto the transmission grid and was told it would be after 2032. That is at least two years longer than the retirement date of the six coal-fired units in the same region. It means the generators will be fully built and will still have to wait because there is no line to carry the electricity out. Whether the national policy goal of 100GW of renewable energy by 2030 succeeds is being decided by when the passage to take that electricity opens rather than by how many plants are built.
The Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment reported its plan for a major energy transition at a Cabinet meeting on April 6 and said it would raise the share of renewable energy from 11.4% to more than 20%. On the 19th of last month, the detailed strategy, the First Basic Plan for Renewable Energy, was released. The New and Renewable Energy Act was also revised into the Renewable Energy Act on March 17 and is set to take effect on September 18, and provisions on new energy were moved to the Hydrogen Act. The overhaul of the rules has been proceeding steadily.
The growth in capacity is not bad either. Domestic renewable capacity rose to about 37.1GW last year. Cumulative solar capacity stands at 30.8GW, and under the 100GW plan another 56.2GW has to be added to reach 87GW. Wind, onshore and offshore combined, is a little over 2.5GW, and the plan calls for increasing it more than fourfold by 2030.
The question is how quickly the buildout happens. Annual solar installations recently peaked at 4.6GW in 2020 and stayed at 3.9GW last year. Reaching 87GW requires laying more than 11GW every year. Installations have to be raised almost threefold, and this is not the kind of bottleneck that is cleared by increasing the number of installation firms.
Solutions for Our Climate pointed to grid connection delays as the key obstacle to renewable expansion. Its assessment is that leaving them unaddressed will shake the 100GW target itself. The project delay cost it presented, citing a study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, averages $200,000 per MW. The point is that overseas as well it was common for financing costs and opportunity costs to pile up while waiting for a connection until the project was abandoned.
Connection order is decided on a first-come, first-served basis. When so-called squatting projects, which secure capacity and never break ground, block the passage, the genuine developers standing behind them have no choice but to wait. The Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment decided to clear out phantom developers with no intention of building, recover 7.9GW of grid capacity and hand it back out to places that will actually build. The procedure and timing for the recovery still need to be refined.
Who takes over the passage vacated by coal is also key. The Basic Plan for Long-term Electricity Supply and Demand set out the closure of 9GW of coal generation by 2030 in places such as Boryeong, Dangjin, Taean, Sacheon and Hadong, but the power source designed to fill the gap behind it is LNG. The closure schedule itself has also been pushed back. Boryeong Unit 5 was delayed nine months to next year, Hadong Units 2 and 3 were each pushed back 24 months to 2029, and Samcheonpo Unit 6 was delayed 25 months to 2031.
In China, renewables account for 60% of total generation capacity, and 452GW was newly installed last year alone. In the first quarter of this year, solar rose 33% and wind 23% from a year earlier. Yet over the same period coal and gas generation increased 4% and power sector emissions rose along with it, and the amount of renewable electricity that is generated but goes unused and is discarded is also growing. The operating practice of running thermal power as the base has been pointed to as the cause.
The remedy the government is preparing takes aim at both the passage and the operation. Kim Sung-hwan, minister of climate, energy and environment, said at a press briefing on the 4th that renewable expansion, grid innovation and climate disaster response infrastructure are national policy tasks and that the government would begin building a distributed energy base in earnest. For offshore wind, instead of laying a separate transmission line for each complex, shared connection facilities that tie several complexes together around a coastal substation will be introduced.
There are expectations that 2-3 trillion won could be saved in Shinan alone. Local production and local consumption distributed grids, an undersea HVDC line on the west coast and regional grid expansion are also being pursued together.
Homework remains on the industry side. The use rate of domestically made solar modules fell to 41.6% in 2024, far from the plan's target of 80%. Most of the offshore wind projects pursued from 2022 to 2024 were fitted with foreign-made turbines.
While the world's mainstream model is the 15MW class and other countries are moving on to the 20MW class, Korea is on the verge of commercializing the 10MW class. Once planned siting and the permitting fast track under the Offshore Wind Special Act are up and running, projects will move faster, but whether domestic industry can supply the increased volume has not been confirmed.
The grid is equipment that does not catch the eye, so it is easily pushed to the back of the discussion. But where a single section of transmission line will be placed is not decided without the consent of local residents, and those talks determine several years. The siting of transmission and substation facilities is decided through resident briefings and public hearings.
