South Korea Seminar Urges Grid and Technology-Mix Overhaul Before Renewable Capacity Push

Policymakers and energy experts convened at the National Assembly in Seoul on June 17 to argue that South Korea’s carbon-free energy strategy must prioritise grid infrastructure and a diversified technology mix, rather than fixating on renewable capacity targets alone. The forum — hosted by People Power Party lawmakers Woo Jae-jun and Kim So-hee alongside two policy institutes— warned that pursuing a 100 GW renewable installation target without concurrent attention to grid capacity, siting constraints, and system costs risks destabilising electricity supply precisely when demand is surging due to AI data centres and advanced semiconductor manufacturing.

A central concern raised by presenters was an emerging transmission bottleneck: new generation assets are concentrated in regional areas while data centre load is clustering in the greater Seoul area, and transmission and substation infrastructure is not keeping pace. A Kangwon National University professor of economics and statisticsargued that designing effective market rules to optimise the existing grid is now more urgent than adding raw capacity, and that inflexible installation targets risk distorting corporate investment signals and raising costs for businesses and the environment alike.

The seminar advocated reframing South Korea’s decarbonisation target from an RE100-style renewables-only commitment to a broader Carbon-Free Energy (CFE) standard encompassing nuclear, hydro, LNG, hydrogen co-firing, and carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS). Nuclear was described by one speaker as the most reliable 24/7 baseload source for AI data centres, while LNG with CCUS and hydrogen blending was proposed as a bridge until new nuclear capacity and small modular reactors (SMRs) reach commercial operation. Participants further called for technology-neutral power purchase agreements (PPAs) — currently skewed toward renewables — arguing that the distinct challenge of South Korea’s electrically isolated grid, with no interconnections to neighbouring countries, makes a renewables-only procurement strategy hard to execute reliably.