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[Why Korea 17] Korea Lags on Renewables. Can Solar and Wind Change That?

Offshore wind turbine and solar panels near Korea's coastline with "More Energy, With Less Space" text overlay

The last piece ended with a question I didn't answer: if Korea decides to go all-in on renewables, how far can it actually get?

Looking for that answer, I stopped on a number. According to Ember's Global Electricity Review 2025, renewables made up just 10% of Korea's electricity generation in 2024. The global average that same year was 32%.

Then I found something else that stopped me a second time. The "10.6%" figure Korea's own government cites isn't quite "renewable energy" — technically, it's "new-and-renewable energy," a category unique to Korean law that lumps solar and wind in with hydrogen fuel cells, coal gasification (IGCC), and waste-to-energy. Under international standards, some of these wouldn't count as renewable at all. So Korea's domestic statistics and the numbers the world uses to compare countries look similar on paper, but they're not measuring quite the same thing.

(For anyone tracking the numbers across this series: the 12.0% cited in the previous piece came from KESIS, Korea's national energy statistics system, while the 10.6% here comes from the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy. Different sources, different scope — that's why the figures don't match.)

Honestly, I didn't know any of this until I went looking. I'd always taken it as a given that "Korea just doesn't have the land for renewables." But is space really the whole story? And if it is a constraint, what exactly is Korea doing about it inside that small footprint?

Turns out, Korea isn't betting on one answer. It's running three experiments at once: reusing the space it already has, pushing out to sea, and moving industry closer to wherever the power is actually made.

Solar: Reusing Space Instead of Finding New Land

The first wall Korea hit with solar was an obvious one. The country is mostly mountains, with little flat, open land to spare. There's no equivalent of the sprawling fields you'd see solar farms occupy in the U.S. or parts of Europe.

So Korean solar expansion took a different shape — not "find new land," but "reuse the land already in use." Factory rooftops. Idle lots inside industrial complexes. Barn roofs and greenhouse coverings. And floating solar, where panels sit directly on reservoirs and lakes. Instead of clearing new ground, Korea has been layering solar on top of space that's already doing something else.

Floating solar is where Korea got an early start relative to other countries. A reservoir's surface isn't much use for anything else industrially, and being over water actually helps — panels run cooler, which improves efficiency compared to land installations. That said, the debate isn't settled: concerns about water quality and visual impact on the landscape are still very much alive.

The limits of this approach are real, too. Even combining every rooftop, every idle lot, and every reservoir, you can't match the sheer physical output of a large-scale solar farm. As of 2024, solar and wind combined accounted for only about 6% of Korea's power generation — roughly half the global average of 12%.

So Korean solar isn't chasing scale. It's chasing density: instead of spreading wide, it's packing as much as possible into the space it already controls.

Offshore Wind: Playing the "Surrounded by Sea" Card

If land is scarce, what about the ocean? Korea is bordered by water on three sides. And yet offshore wind made up just 0.5% of power generation in 2024 — essentially flat since 2020.

The problem was never the resource. It was speed. Every offshore wind project used to require a private developer to scout a site, win over local residents, and clear permitting — entirely on its own, from scratch, every time. The industry's own complaint was that this process took an average of ten years.

That changed on March 26, 2026, when Korea's Offshore Wind Special Act took effect. Under the new system, the government pre-screens sites for economic viability, environmental impact, and community acceptance, designates them as "preliminary zones," and then puts them up for bid. Developers no longer have to hunt for a location and build a case for it from zero. The government's stated goal is to cut the typical development timeline from ten years down to five or six. It's only been in effect for a few months, though, so whether it actually delivers on that is still an open question.

But one Korean company had already jumped into offshore wind long before this law existed.

SK Oceanplant. The company started out as Samkang M&T, a shipbuilding and marine equipment maker. When Korea's shipbuilding industry was struggling, Samkang redirected its shipbuilding know-how into manufacturing offshore wind substructures — the massive steel jackets that anchor turbines to the seabed. In 2020, it became the first Korean company to export offshore wind substructures. Today, it holds roughly 44% of Taiwan's offshore wind substructure market and is widely regarded as Asia's leading manufacturer in the category.

It's hard not to notice the parallel with a scene from a previous piece in this series on shipbuilding: Korea surviving by chasing a narrow, technically demanding niche — LNG carriers — instead of competing on volume. The same survival instinct is showing up again, this time in a different ocean industry. SK Oceanplant is set to supply substructures for Korea's first offshore wind project on the scale of a nuclear reactor unit, and it's already built a track record in floating offshore wind off the coast of Ulsan. The skills that got a shipyard through a brutal decade have become the growth engine for a different industry entirely — one that also happens to live on the water.

Saemangeum: Closing the Distance Between Power and Industry

The third approach took a completely different angle. If there isn't enough space to generate power where industry needs it, why not bring the industry to where the power already is?

Saemangeum, in North Jeolla Province, is that experiment. In February 2026, Hyundai Motor Group announced a 9 trillion won (roughly $6.5 billion) investment to build a robotics, AI, and hydrogen energy hub there — a plan to build an AI data center, a hydrogen electrolysis plant, and robot manufacturing facilities across a roughly 280-acre site by 2029.

Saemangeum already had the largest ground-mounted solar facility in Korea. Hyundai's plan builds on top of it: gigawatt-scale solar generation plus a hydrogen electrolysis plant producing 80 tons of green hydrogen a day, with the energy consumed right where it's made. Officials describe it using the term "jisan-jiso" (지산지소, literally "produced locally, consumed locally") — a model designed to shrink the distance between where power is generated and where it's used.

This isn't a one-off idea. It fits inside a broader policy framework under Korea's Special Act on Distributed Energy. The government has been designating regions that can generate and consume power locally as "distributed energy zones," loosening regulations for projects that fit the model. As facilities like AI data centers — which demand enormous, constant amounts of power — become more common, placing industry near the power source, rather than transmitting electricity long distances to reach it, is starting to look like a real alternative.

So, Will Any of This Actually Work?

Nobody can say for certain yet.

Solar is bumping up against a hard physical ceiling on space. The Offshore Wind Special Act has barely had time to prove itself. And Saemangeum won't have a real answer until the 9 trillion won plan is actually built out by 2029. All three are still in progress.

What's interesting, though, isn't whether Korea has already solved this — it hasn't. It's that instead of simply accepting its constraints, Korea keeps adjusting its methods to work around them: reusing space where land is scarce, rewriting regulation where offshore wind moves too slowly, and relocating industry where the power grid can't keep up.

Whether these experiments ultimately succeed is still unknown. But Korea isn't answering "can we scale up renewables?" with a flat yes or no — it's answering it by testing whatever approach fits its own specific constraints.

And that raises the next obvious question. Solar and wind output rises and falls with the weather. So how do you store that uneven flow of electricity until the moment you actually need it?

Chasing that question is what led me to understand why Korea has gotten so serious about ESS — energy storage systems.

That's the story I'll pick up next.

Curious about Korea?

So am I.

Key Takeaways

  • Per Ember's 2024 data, renewables made up 10% of Korea's electricity generation, far below the global average of 32%. Korea's own government figure, 10.6%, uses a broader "new-and-renewable energy" category that includes fuel cells, IGCC, and waste-to-energy alongside solar and wind.
  • With limited flat land, Korea is expanding solar by reusing existing space — factory rooftops, idle industrial land, and floating solar on reservoirs — rather than developing new sites.
  • The Offshore Wind Special Act, effective March 26, 2026, introduces a government-led site-designation system aimed at cutting typical project development time from ten years to five or six.
  • SK Oceanplant, which began as a shipbuilder, redirected its expertise into offshore wind substructures and now holds roughly 44% of Taiwan's market — making it Asia's leading manufacturer in the category.
  • Saemangeum combines Hyundai Motor Group's 9 trillion won investment with Korea's distributed-energy-zone policy, testing a "produced locally, consumed locally" model that pairs solar and green hydrogen production with the industry that uses it.

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