Overview of renewable energy development in South Korea and the economic analysis of grid interconnection for large scale offshore wind farm

Korean government has a very strong interest in renewable energy development and has planned several deployment programs due to the lack of fossil energy resource and the necessity of CO₂ reduction. Especially, Korean government has heightened interest in large offshore wind farm among the renewable energy sources and two development projects are performed. The pilot test of a 2MW offshore wind generator construction has been conducted successfully in JEJU and a 2.5GW offshore wind farm development project is in progress on Young-gwang offshore led by the government. This paper introduces the policy and statistics on the renewable energy development and status of the offshore wind farm development project in Korea. Also economic analysis results of grid connection options for this project are presented. For the grid connection options, LCC HVDC, VSC HVDC and HVAC have been considered and LCC HVDC has been evaluated as the most cost-effective option among the candidates. For the economic analysis, we used Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) method to compare the total investment cost and levelized cost of candidates.