South Korea’s Big Bet on Green Energy Is Bogged Down

South Korea wants to bet big on green energy. The country has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050 and has recently announced plans to construct the world’s largest offshore floating wind farm at the price of about $32 billion.

South Korea’s Big Bet on Green Energy Is Bogged Down

By Morten Soendergaard Larsen

Out in the sea east of Ulsan, South Korea’s pulsating industrial heartland, a new industry is rising and will eventually tower over the shipbuilding, car manufacturing, and petrochemical plants on land. Literally: Offshore windmills are very tall.

South Korea wants to bet big on green energy. The country has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050 and has recently announced plans to construct the world’s largest offshore floating wind farm at the price of about $32 billion.

But the Ulsan program is now facing a new set of challenges: To make a meaningful difference in energy supply, it needs to move farther out to sea and requires better technology.

Yet Seoul appears intent on relying on South Korean industry alone to develop this, which could set back its plans. The government’s big ambitions are also prompting an outcry from South Korea’s giant fishing industry.

For the moment, the nation’s green energy to create 12 gigawatts of offshore wind power capacity—multiple times more than what it is producing today—far outpace its plans. And experts, activists, and even some in the industry raise doubts to whether South Korea has what it takes to truly become a green leader, even though Seoul just finished hosting a big international summit promoting green partnerships.

“If you look at the Dogger Bank wind farm [in the North Sea off England], which is already hundreds of square miles with multiple 14-15 megawatts wind turbines: That is only 3.6 gigawatts. We need ten times more in nine years’ time, and we need 20-to-30 times more to be carbon neutral,” said Chong Ng, head of research at Catapult, an innovation center for offshore renewable energy based in the United Kingdom.

One big problem, Ng added in an interview, is that “we don’t have space on the seabed anymore. The only way we can explore this wind resource is to go for deeper sea. To get to the deep sea, we need a floating wind turbine.”

That technology is not yet matured. Take the cables needed to anchor the windmills’ floating platforms to the seabed. They need to withstand the force of a windmill generating a massive amount of energy for 25 years, yet they also need to be detachable so the platforms and windmills can be taken in for inspection. That technology needs to be figured out.

Yet the administration of South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in wants the technology to be developed in South Korea, forgoing the expertise of major global players like Siemens, the German company. Speaking to Foreign Policy on background, representatives of several international wind power companies complained about the process of getting into the South Korean market.

They cite a lack of transparency and a clear road map as to how the green transition is going to happen, but the biggest issue, they say, is the favoritism skewed toward South Korean companies. This means, according to the international giants, that the South Korean project will be slower, less efficient, and more expensive, because they will not have the latest and best technology.

“I don’t think any of the windmills in the UK are built in the UK. They just got the best technology from Siemens and these guys,” said Sam Macdonald, international solidarity coordinator for Friends of the Earth Korea, a climate-focused nongovernmental organization. “Whereas in Korea, it is still very nationally focused; it is still going to be Korean windmills made by Korean companies.”

Originally published at Foreign policy