Published : Aug. 11, 2017 - 13:26
South Korea is planning to reduce the electricity reserve rate by up to 2 percent in 2030 amid its new energy policy to phase out nuclear power plants, the government said Friday.
A government panel to outline the country's biennial power supply road map said that it determined the reasonable electricity reserve rate to be 20-22 percent in the cited year, compared with 22 percent estimated two years earlier.
A 1 percentage-point drop in the reserve rate can allow the government not to build a power plant with a capacity of 1 gigawatt.
(123RF)
At the same time, the electricity demand estimate has been lowered by 11.3 GW to 101.9 GW from an earlier forecast.
But the panel said it needs additional power-generating facilities of some 5-10 GW by 2030 to meet power demand that reflects an estimated 2.5 percent growth in the national economy.
Some 62.6 GW of electricity will likely come from renewable energy like solar power in 2030, up from the current 17.2 GW.
The Moon Jae-in government's nuclear-free policy has been hitting media headlines for months. The chief executive declared in June it will phase out nuclear-based energy production going forward and replace it with renewable energy, suspending construction of two reactors and vowing to shut down those that reach their operational life cycles. (Yonhap)