The diagnosis and the response
On 29 September the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment reported a grid plan to the Cabinet. Five strategies and nine tasks, with a stated purpose of making room on the existing network for 100 GW or more of renewables by 2030 without waiting for new transmission to be built.
Offshore wind is not the plan’s subject, yet it recurs at almost every point where the Ministry explains why the southwest is full, and two claims carry that argument.
The first is a forecast. Offshore wind in the Jeonnam and Jeonbuk grid region holds connection rights totalling 15.8 GW dated to 2030, of which the Ministry expects about 3 GW to enter service.
The second is a diagnosis. Large offshore wind projects, the plan says, have taken the grid first, leaving solar that could connect in the short term to wait. Offshore wind has reserved transmission capacity for after 2030, and that constraint blocks solar connection even before 2030. The Ministry uses a blunter word for it. The Korean is 알박기, which is what you call someone who buys a small plot in the path of a development and sits on it.
The Ministry has therefore settled on a response. Around 10 GW of offshore wind transmission capacity in the region, which it expects to connect later than its allocated date, goes to the solar projects next in line from the fourth quarter of 2026.
Who the nine tasks are for
The nine tasks sort out as follows.
Flexible connection raises the limit on a distribution line from 14 MW to 16 MW and on a substation transformer from 50 MW to 60 MW. Autonomous connection lets a developer install two to three times the rated connection capacity and manage output within it using storage. Distribution storage adds 3 GW of solar in saturated areas by 2030. Substation storage adds 1.6 GW. The cost-sharing reform opens with the observation that most solar developers connect at distribution level.
None of that reaches offshore wind, and the plan states the condition that rules it out. A renewable plant above 40 MW connecting at transmission level, it notes, needs headroom on the transmission network alone, irrespective of the distribution line or the substation. Korean offshore wind projects are almost all above 40 MW. Raising a distribution line by 2 MW cannot help them.
Three tasks do reach offshore wind.
The dispatch order used to test whether a new plant can connect is changed so that renewables run ahead of coal and LNG. The Ministry expects this to add about 20 GW of renewable headroom outside the capital region, of which about 18 GW falls in Yeongnam and Gangwon.
Connection assessment stops assuming every licensed project will reach construction. From 2031 onwards new volumes are assessed against an implementation rate of 67.2 per cent, the share of licensed projects that sign a grid use contract within a year. The plan names offshore wind as the reason this is needed, because a large block arriving at once can saturate a region that had headroom the year before. The expected effect is up to 2.4 GW of additional capacity accommodated at the permitting stage in Jeonnam and Jeonbuk, and that gain is open to new wind permits as much as to solar.
And the connection regime itself is rebuilt, which is section 05.
The fourth task that reaches offshore wind is the one that takes capacity back.
