South Korea Unveils $747 Billion K-GX Plan to Triple Renewables by 2030

South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, unveiled a sweeping national energy strategy on Wednesday that commits roughly 1,000 trillion won, or about $747 billion, through 2035 to triple the country’s renewable power capacity and wean its industrial base off imported fossil fuels. The plan, branded K-GX for Korea Green Transformation, pairs direct government spending with climate financing from state-run banks and sets a target of at least 100 gigawatts (GW) of renewable capacity by 2030, up from roughly 37 GW installed today.

A $747 billion bet, split between budget and bank financing

Of the headline figure, about 200 trillion won ($149 billion) comes from direct fiscal spending, while the remaining 790 trillion won (roughly $590 billion) is expected from climate financing mobilized by five state-run financial institutions, according to the government’s announcement. Seoul said additional private capital would be mobilized on top of that base. “The green transition is a sure strategy for the future that will secure international competitiveness while protecting people’s lives and livelihoods from the climate crisis,” Lee said in presenting the strategy.

The 100 GW renewable target would nearly triple South Korea’s current installed base and supersede the more cautious trajectory laid out in the country’s 11th Basic Plan for Long-Term Electricity Supply and Demand, which had envisioned around 63 GW of solar and 18 GW of wind capacity on a longer timeline. K-GX compresses that build-out into the next four years.

Why Seoul is in a hurry: one of the world’s largest fossil-fuel import bills

South Korea has almost no domestic oil or gas production and imports nearly all the fuel it burns for power and industry. Energy think tank Ember Energy estimates the country’s fossil-fuel import bill for 2026 at around $133 billion, a sum large enough that South Korea spends a bigger share of its GDP on fossil fuel imports than roughly 94% of the world’s population, by the group’s analysis. The same analysis credits existing wind and solar generation with having avoided about $25 billion in cumulative fossil-fuel import costs since 2010, including an estimated $4.7 billion in savings this year alone. Ember’s modeling suggests that reaching the 100 GW renewable target could cut the sector’s annual import exposure sharply, though that projection is an independent estimate rather than a government figure.

The grid bottleneck behind the “energy expressway”

South Korea’s best solar and wind resources sit in the southwestern Honam region, far from Seoul and the semiconductor and data-center clusters around the capital that are driving a surge in electricity demand. Existing transmission capacity between Honam and Seoul is limited to about 4.5 GW, a constraint that has already forced curtailment of renewable output on sunny, windy days. K-GX addresses this with a nationwide high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission backbone the government calls an “energy expressway,” intended to be substantially built out by the 2040s. A West Coast HVDC corridor carrying a projected 7.9 trillion won investment is the first piece, with its initial segment targeted to begin operating in 2031.

Steel, batteries and hydrogen get their own targets

Beyond power generation, K-GX sets sector-specific industrial goals. The government wants hydrogen-based steelmaking — which replaces coking coal with hydrogen to strip oxygen from iron ore — to reach 300,000 tonnes of output by 2030, expand to 2.5 million tonnes between 2031 and 2036, and become the dominant production method by 2050. The strategy also backs next-generation solar cells, all-solid-state batteries and broader green manufacturing, and envisions electric and hydrogen vehicles accounting for more than 70% of new car sales by 2035.

Notably, Lee’s announcement centered on renewables, grid infrastructure, hydrogen and industrial decarbonization without detailing nuclear measures, even though some international wire summaries of the plan folded in references to small modular reactors (SMRs). South Korea is pursuing SMR development on a separate track: the country passed an SMR Special Act earlier this year targeting roughly 700 megawatts of SMR capacity by 2035, a policy distinct from K-GX. It is also a far smaller commitment than Seoul’s $120 billion pledge toward eight large nuclear reactors in the United States, announced just days earlier, which funds reactors on American soil rather than at home.

What happens next

K-GX now moves to implementation, with the bulk of the climate-finance portion dependent on lending decisions by the five state banks involved and on private capital that has not yet been committed. Analysts will be watching whether transmission permitting — historically one of the slowest parts of South Korea’s energy build-out — can keep pace with the government’s 2031 target for the first HVDC segment, and whether the renewable capacity additions needed to hit 100 GW by 2030 can clear the interconnection queue fast enough to avoid further curtailment.

Sources

• The Korea Times (citing Reuters), “Korea to accelerate renewable energy expansion to 100GW by 2030,” Oct. 7, 2026 — koreatimes.co.kr — announcement details, official quote, date.
• ESG News, “South Korea Announces $747 Billion Energy Transition Plan Through 2035,” Oct. 7, 2026 — esgnews.com — investment breakdown and sector targets.
• Ember Energy, “South Korea turbocharges energy transition as fossil fuel bill heads for USD 184 billion” — ember-energy.org — current capacity, import-cost analysis, grid bottleneck data.
• OilPrice.com, “South Korea Unveils $747 Billion Plan to Break Its Fossil Fuel Habit,” Oct. 7, 2026 — oilprice.com — corroboration.

Illustrative image. Photo: Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — source