In the 2025 film KPop Demon Hunters, a slick South Korean boy band acts as cover for a diabolical plot to feed humanity to a ravenous, fiery, subterranean monster. Believe it or not, that's a decent way of thinking about its energy policy.
There's been lots of reasons for fans of the energy transition to idolize the country of late. President Lee Jae Myung was one of the first world leaders to name the Iran war as a reason to accelerate the switch to clean power. "Relying on fossil energy is extremely dangerous for the future," he said during a visit to Jeju island, an aspiring wind and solar hub. "All energy sources must be rapidly transitioned to renewable energy."
By 2030, the country wants to generate more than 30% of its electricity from renewables and 70% from clean sources, including nuclear. Even parking lots are now required to install solar panels on canopies.
Such comments and initiatives are catnip for a world enamored with the soft-power allure of Korean-wave entertainment. The truth is a lot less shiny.
South Korea is the biggest consumer of coal per capita after Kazakhstan, China, and Australia. Unlike those three, its build-out of renewables is minuscule, at less than 10% of generation, and stalling. About 60% of grid power comes from fossil fuels, and debt-laden state monopoly Korea Electric Power Corp., or Kepco, is an implacable impediment to change.
Under current conditions, Lee's clean energy targets have no chance of being met. In the new world sparked by the Iran conflict, that's not just a disappointment in climate terms. It's also a strategic threat to the country, as well as to a global electronics industry that feeds on South Korea's dominant share in memory chip production.
As with the evil boy band in KPop Demon Hunters, this infernal mess is hidden behind a beautiful facade. South Korea is roughly the size of Oregon or Iceland, with a cherished rural heritage. Two-thirds is forest, one of the highest proportions anywhere. One in three Koreans goes hiking at least once a month. With less farmland than Libya, it's almost self-sufficient in rice.
That's helped drive potent nimbyism. Near Jeju, one of the world's largest offshore wind projects was halted in February after investors including Equinor ASA withdrew in the face of requirements that it sell all its power on the island and spend about $1.8 billion in community profit-sharing fees. Others have faced entrenched opposition from fishing fleets despite the absence of any evidence of harm to fisheries after decades of offshore wind in the North Sea.
At Miryang near the industrial city of Ulsan, local retirees fought a six-year battle up to 2014 to block the building of transmission pylons. At Taebaek, a declining former coal mining town in the mountainous east, a small wind farm has only been built after residents were given a financial stake paying three times the yield on government bonds. Even onshore wind projects have typically taken 10 years to get approved and required negotiations over permits across eight different ministries and 22 sets of regulations.
Work is underway to improve some of this. New rules passed last year are meant to get wind farms approved in six years. Laws that had restricted solar to less than 1% of the land area in many counties have also being overturned.
But entrenched and conflicted vested interests are still dominant. Kepco has effectively banned all new generators in the renewables-rich east and Jeju until 2032, because its crumbling grid is supposedly incapable of accepting new connections. That decision does nothing to advance South Korea's energy transition. It does mean, however, that Kepco's own power plants don't have to compete with new entrants.
It's this regulatory morass, rather than South Korea's unforgiving geography and nimbyism, that's most responsible for renewable power costs that are the highest of any major economy.
The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz should be the catalyst needed to change things. The popularity of nuclear power, a homegrown success story that produces about 30% of electricity, suggests the public is ready to acknowledge some of the hard choices that need to be made around its energy mix.
Iran's success in blocking the strait is a visceral reminder of the risks of asymmetric warfare over ocean channels. Like its neighbor Taiwan, South Korea depends on a constant flow of imported fuels that could be easily disrupted by mines laid by North Korea or even China. Kepco's huge generation plants provide tempting targets for rocket attacks—something that distributed clean energy could help fix.
In KPop Demon Hunters, the threat from the diabolical boy band is ultimately defeated when a key character finally accepts some painful facts. Here's a difficult home truth: South Korea's sleek modern society is built on an insatiable appetite for fossil fuels that's undermining its economy, its environment, and its security.
If that's going to change, the government, Kepco, and society at large need to start fighting the demons that have kept them hooked on polluting power.