[Anchor]

Renewable energy is one of the measures being taken to address the ever-increasing demand for power. Unlike solar power, which has been gaining momentum, the deployment of offshore wind power has been sluggish. The stigma that it might be difficult in South Korea due to weak sea breezes has followed it. However, a new analysis has emerged showing that there are seas in various places with sufficient wind.

This is a report by Jang Se-man, Senior Reporter on Climate and Environment.

[Reporter]

A wind measurement device is planted in the middle of the West Sea.

It measures sea breezes across four seasons to determine whether wind power generation is feasible.

When the industry weighs electricity supply prices and profitability, the wind speed at which domestic offshore wind projects have economic feasibility is an annual average of 7.5 meters per second.

[Choi Sung-jae / Director, Vision Plus Technical Research Institute: If you add up the construction costs, operating costs, and other development costs for offshore wind, it usually needs to be around 7.5 m/s for us to carry out a project.]

What is the current wind speed like?

A research team in South Korea is set to release the results of a three-year survey on wind conditions in our coastal waters conducted as a national R&D project, and we previewed the findings.

The areas satisfying a wind speed of 7.5 meters per second reached 90 percent of the total in the South Sea, where wind paths are open, 56 percent in the East Sea, and 34 percent even in the West Sea, which is blocked by Chinese geographic features.

This means the area of economically viable seas has expanded more than threefold compared to the survey results from 10 years ago.

While the expansion of the survey target areas itself was a major reason, advances in wind turbine technology also played a part.

Due to the larger size of turbines, the height of wind generators has more than doubled, because wind characteristics dictate that wind speeds increase the higher the location.

[Kim Jin-young / Researcher, Korea Institute of Energy Research: It is true that wind speeds are relatively weak compared to Europe, but it is clear that our industrial technology has already secured the ability to find and utilize resources to overcome this.]

However, there are also limitations.

The current price received when selling offshore wind electricity to KEPCO is in the 350 won range per kilowatt-hour, which is expensive compared to nuclear power or LNG, as well as solar power.

Considering KEPCO's profit and loss and the scale of offshore wind subsidies, the government's policy is to lower the purchase price to the 250 won range by 2030.

Experts advise that while increasing the economic viability of offshore wind by lowering turbine introduction prices, efforts to advance technology for improving the competitiveness of the domestic wind industry must be pursued in parallel.

(Video by Seol Chi-hwan | Video Editing by Kim Jun-hee | Reporting Support by Semyung University Graduate School of Journalism)