South Korea's Offshore Wind Push Exposes a Supply Chain Gap

South Korea's offshore wind industry is entering a new phase, but its supply chain may not keep pace with its ambitions. The National Assembly has passed a special act to promote deployment and build up the industry, introducing planned siting and a government-led system for identifying sites.

The government is also moving from a market centered on Renewable Energy Certificates (REC) to one built around long-term contracts. It has set deployment targets of 10.5GW by 2030 and 25GW by 2035.

A gap between targets and capacity

Hitting those targets means producing and installing roughly 4GW of capacity a year after 2030. With 15MW-class turbines, that equals about 267 offshore turbines annually that must be manufactured, transported and installed. Blade, tower and substructure factories, dedicated ports and large installation vessels would all be needed on a continuous basis.

None of this can be secured overnight. Large substructure fabrication yards take years to build, and installation vessels such as WTIVs need years between order and delivery. The government has announced separate plans for dedicated ports and installation vessels, reflecting that reality.

The country has world-class shipbuilding, steel and machinery industries that could be extended into offshore wind. Yet a dedicated supply chain has not been fully built, because supply chain development was not managed as a policy goal on par with deployment, the analysis argues. It points to the UK, which has deployed offshore wind on a very large scale while depending heavily on foreign suppliers, and to China, which built an integrated chain spanning turbines, substructures, vessels and maintenance.

Making supply chain plans binding

If contractor selection is driven only by the economics of individual projects, existing foreign vessels are likely to win, leaving no domestic investment, shipbuilding or operating experience. A pilot project in the southwest of North Jeolla Province has added supply chain evaluation to its bidder selection, but the analysis says evaluation alone is not enough if developers can change suppliers after winning rights.

It calls for developers to submit supply chain plans covering turbines, towers, substructures, cables and vessels alongside generation plans, and for those plans to become a core condition of the license, with heavy penalties for material changes.

The concern is already visible in the latest competitive tender. Of 1.7GW of fixed-bottom capacity, only 300MW went to the public-led track, while 1.4GW was assigned to the general competitive track.