Seoul Lifts Grid Caps for 100 GW of Renewables as US Tightens Supply Chain Rules

The ministry also reopened parts of the Chungcheong region and said east coast restrictions will lift in the first half of 2027, when the first phase of a high-voltage direct current line from the east coast to Singapyeong is completed, according to pv magazine. Projects already queued for connection get priority; new applications move to a revised framework from January 2027.

Under the new regime, projects can connect beyond a grid section's normal hosting limit and accept curtailment when generation exceeds what the network can carry. The ministry said the change raises the solar connection limit on a distribution line from 14 MW to 16 MW and at a substation from 50 MW to 60 MW, allowing 2.6 GW of additional solar in Honam alone without new grid construction.

Storage does part of the work. By 2030 the ministry aims to connect 3 GW of additional solar in saturated areas through batteries on distribution networks and another 1.6 GW through storage at substations. It did not specify the battery capacity involved. It also said it has recovered 9 GW of connection rights from solar projects that reserved capacity but were not viable, and expects to recover more than 10 GW in Honam by 2030, including from delayed offshore wind.

Queue reform and a 6,600 MWh tender

The ministry projects distribution-level capacity rising from 84 GW to 110 GW by 2030. In Honam it projects transmission capacity going from 37 GW to 64 GW and distribution from 18 GW to 30 GW. One methodological change matters as much as the hardware: connection studies previously assumed new renewables ran after existing fossil plants, and will now assume renewables are dispatched first, which the ministry estimates frees 20 GW of additional renewable capacity nationwide by 2030, including in the coal and LNG-heavy Yeongnam and Gangwon regions.

Separately, the Korea Power Exchange opened a tender on 22 September for 1,100 MW/6,600 MWh of six-hour battery storage under 15-year contracts. Winners are due in November, with commissioning by February 2029.

Seoul-based think tank Solutions for Our Climate argued in a June 2026 paper that the first-come, first-served queue let stalled projects hold scarce grid capacity, and called for connections to be prioritised by project readiness with more disclosure of congestion data.

From January 2027 grid connection rights will be tied to a reformed renewable portfolio standard, allocated by competitive bidding. South Korea is forecast to add 3.5 GW of solar this year, according to the Export-Import Bank of Korea.

Washington moves the other way on equipment

On 26 August 2026, President Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency to ban or restrict high-risk foreign-produced equipment in the US electric grid, citing hidden cybersecurity vulnerabilities, malware and remote-access risks. Per SemiEngineering, the order covers equipment, hardware, software and firmware used in generation, transmission or control facilities operating at 69 kilovolts or above: large transformers, grid-tied inverters, circuit breakers, battery energy storage systems, SCADA software and industrial control systems. Residential solar inverters and commercial distribution below 69 kV fall outside it.

No vendor has been named. The specifics arrive only when the Department of Energy publishes implementing rules, due 24 December 2026, which may take the form of a prohibited-entity list, a pre-qualified vendor white list, or both. A predecessor order in 2020 produced a single prohibition action before being suspended and rescinded in 2021; the 2026 version extends into firmware, signing keys, cloud connections and update paths.

SemiEngineering cites the International Energy Agency putting China at roughly 80% of world manufacturing capacity for batteries and solar inverters, with Chinese firms at around half of all solar inverters installed globally. Large power transformers already carry multi-year lead times, and the order requires reliability, safety and replacement availability to be weighed before any removal is ordered.

Small cells, and a city that fixed its losses

Aggregation is the other half of the connection problem. MIT Technology Review reported on 1 October that New York's permitting tangle has pushed startups toward small batteries in unexpected places. PopWheels runs about 50 battery-swap cabinets and roughly 2,500 batteries for delivery e-bikes, and has started supplying food cart operators; about four of its batteries supply five kilowatt-hours, roughly a day's operation for many carts. Copper builds induction stoves with integrated batteries, Every Electric plugs batteries into air-conditioning units, and David Energy targets laundromats, parking garages and gyms.

PopWheels cofounder David Hammer said at a New York Climate Week event on 24 September that the number-one challenge for large-scale centralized storage providers is that their benefits are abstract and their costs are concrete. Copper cofounder and CEO Sam Calisch said at the same event that if every stove in America shipped with a battery it would add up to tens of gigawatts, and that the company is selling cost savings, not just resilience.

Demand-side fixes have a counterpart on the theft side. IEEE Spectrum reported on 1 October that Delhi cut electricity losses from about 50% to 5% over 25 years, and that Georgia went from losses above 16% in 2002 to about 8% in 2023, while Singapore fell from 6.6% to 0.2%. More than half the countries tracking these metrics lost at least 10% of their electricity in 2023, according to the World Bank, with losses above 20% in 24 nations. The same edition notes that no single technology solves the problem, which is why the Korean package leans on curtailment, storage, queue reform and dispatch assumptions at once.