South Korea Opens Grid to 100 GW of Renewables as Insurers Flag Shared-Connection Risk

South Korea will replace hard limits on renewable grid connections with a flexible regime, the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment said on 1 October. The ministry lifted restrictions in the Honam region and said it aims to accommodate more than 100 GW of renewable generation by 2030.

Under the new rules, projects can connect beyond a grid section's normal hosting limit. They will be curtailed when output exceeds what the network can absorb. The ministry said this 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. It estimates the change alone will allow 2.6 GW of additional solar in Honam without new grid construction.

The plan leans on storage as a substitute for new lines. By 2030, the ministry wants 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 capacity of the batteries involved.

Recovered rights and a new queue

South Korea has already recovered 9 GW of connection rights by checking solar projects that reserved capacity but were not viable. It will push back the connection rights of long-delayed projects to the date they will actually use the grid. The ministry expects to recover more than 10 GW in Honam alone by 2030, including from delayed offshore wind projects. For capacity entering from 2031, it will allocate rights using a 67.2% actual on-time completion rate for renewable projects, instead of assuming every project is built on schedule.

Connection studies will change as well. Until now they assumed new renewables would run after existing fossil fuel plants. They will now assume renewables are dispatched first. The ministry estimates this shift will allow 20 GW of additional renewable capacity nationwide by 2030, including in the Yeongnam and Gangwon regions where coal and LNG plants are concentrated. From January 2027, rights will be linked to a reformed renewable portfolio standard and awarded through competitive bidding rather than first-come, first-served.

The ministry projects national transmission-level hosting capacity rising from 119 GW to 171 GW by 2030, and distribution-level capacity from 84 GW to 110 GW. In Honam, it sees transmission capacity climbing from 37 GW to 64 GW and distribution from 18 GW to 30 GW.

Insurance exposure at shared connection points

The push comes as insurers warn that co-located projects concentrate risk. Olly Litterick, head of renewables at Tokio Marine GX, told ESS News that shared grid connections now carry "hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions of dollars of exposure in a single location where multiple insureds share grid connection points," according to pv magazine on 1 October.

Litterick said a failure at a shared export point can affect several insured projects at once, because TMGX covers loss of revenue resulting from physical damage. "When the grid goes down due to [a] material damage incident or there's a transformer failure or something of that description, you know, the numbers can be astronomical," he said. TMGX underwriter James Totton has described aggregation risk at single substation connection points as co-location grows. The broker Marsh says in its BESS risk guidance that insurers need sufficient separation between battery modules and critical infrastructure such as site transformers and substations.

Thermal runaway remains the main driver of probable maximum loss estimates. Litterick said the spacing arrangement is important to how TMGX underwrites storage, and that most of its roughly 8 GW book is still in construction. He called the claims record "very, very early stage."

Washington sets a deadline on equipment

An executive order signed by President Trump on 26 August declared a national emergency to ban or restrict high-risk foreign-produced equipment in the U.S. electric grid, according to SemiEngineering. The order covers equipment, hardware, software and firmware used in generation, transmission or control facilities operating at 69 kilovolts or above, including large transformers, grid-tied inverters, circuit breakers, battery storage systems and SCADA software.

Specifics do not exist yet: the Department of Energy must publish implementing rules by 24 December 2026, which may take the form of a prohibited-entity list, a pre-qualified vendor white list, or both. The order defines a "Covered Foreign Entity" broadly, covering companies owned by, controlled by or subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary. Because it follows the supply chain downward, a U.S. or European manufacturer sourcing critical sub-components from a covered jurisdiction may still find its finished product restricted.

The 2020 predecessor order focused on hardware provenance and 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.