What is settled, and what the notice has not written yet
On 30 September the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment held a public hearing on the subordinate legislation for its renewable energy overhaul. Around 700 people attended. The amended Renewable Energy Act was promulgated in September 2026 and takes effect on 1 January 2027. The hearing put the draft enforcement decree and enforcement rule on the table, clause by clause, alongside a three column comparison against the current text.
The structure matters more than any single clause. The Act sets the frame. The decree and the rule set who is covered and by what procedure. The notice and the contract market operating rules set the volumes and the prices. The notice is scheduled for the first quarter of 2027.
So the numbers a developer needs are not in this package. Page after page of the hearing material carries a tag reading “to be set in the notice or below”. What the package does settle is the machinery, and one sentence in it, if it survives into the notice, changes how every offshore wind project that has not yet contracted will be paid.
That sentence says the base certificate weighting for wind is deleted and reflected in the ceiling price, and that the depth and distance elements, among others, are to be retired or recalculated in stages. To see what that does, you have to see what the weighting has been doing.
The ceiling was never the price
Korea publishes a ceiling price for each offshore wind auction round. For the first half of 2026 it was 171,229 won per MWh for fixed-bottom projects connecting to the mainland grid, and 175,100 won for floating. Those numbers are widely quoted as though they were what a winning project gets paid. They are not. They are one input to a formula.
The Korea Energy Agency notice for that round states the contract price as follows. Contract price equals the reference power price plus the weighting multiplied by the gap, where the gap is the bid price and any preferential price less that reference. The reference power price for the round was 86,350 won per MWh. So the gap the weighting multiplies is 84,879 won, not the whole 171,229.
The Agency's own frequently asked questions set out a worked example. A project with a weighting of 2.5 bids 150,000 won per MWh and is selected. The reference price is 80,000 won and there is no preferential price. The contract price is 255,000 won per MWh. A bid of 150,000 becomes a contract of 255,000 because the weighting multiplies the 70,000 won gap two and a half times over.
This is the same confusion that has travelled through international coverage of Korea for years. We wrote about what the ceiling actually did when we looked at the road to 250 won: The Road to ₩250, and What the Auction Ceiling Actually Did. The ceiling is a cap on the bid, not a cap on the payment.
The preferential prices sit inside the same bracket, which means they are multiplied too. The public-led track for 2026 carried 3,660 won per MWh for supply chain and security contribution and a further 27,840 won for using equipment from government research and demonstration programmes. At the 2.50 floor that 27,840 is worth 69,600. At 4.20, the median we estimate for sites deeper than 60 metres, it is worth 116,928. The amplification disappears with the weighting.
