By Heejin Kim
SEOUL, Sept 8 (Reuters) – South Korea’s demand for power in the coming years is set to surge on plans by chipmakers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to expand production and the building of new AI data centres, according to the country’s energy minister.
Those AI-driven power needs alone will lift South Korea’s demand for power by 25 to 30 gigawatts, the Minister of Climate, Energy and Environment Kim Sung-whan said in a Reuters interview this month.
On top of that, the country will also need to contend with increased power demand due to the shift to electric vehicles from gasoline-engine cars and to heating via electricity rather than gas, he added.
His comments come ahead of a government plan to unveil next month an update to the nation’s long-term energy roadmap, extending it by two years to 2040. One key focus is whether South Korea will announce plans to build more nuclear reactors.
Kim declined to comment on how many more reactors he thinks the country needs, saying the matter was being reviewed by experts. But he described nuclear energy as “an essential element to consider within the power generation structure of our energy mix.”
If an extra 25 to 30 gigawatts were to come from nuclear energy alone, that would be equivalent to the capacity of about 20 reactors based on the current standards of a South Korean-designed unit.
Asia’s fourth-largest economy currently has 26 nuclear reactors and nuclear energy accounts for just under a third of the country’s power needs.
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Samsung and SK Hynix — two of the world’s biggest chipmakers whose products are essential to AI infrastructure — have pledged to build new factories in the country’s southwest as part of an 800 trillion won ($590 billion) “mega project” announced by the government this year.
“Projects originally planned to be built by around 2045 have been significantly accelerated and are now due to be completed by the early 2030s,” Kim said.
Kim also said that several U.S. tech companies including Nvidia have expressed interest in building data centres in South Korea because of its dependable power supply.
While South Korea aims to boost renewables — which account for 11% of its power needs currently — reliance on nuclear energy is unavoidable for now despite its safety risks, he said.
A poll by the state-run Korea Energy Information Culture Agency found 79% of 2,000 respondents supported including new nuclear plants in the roadmap.
But in May, a civic group in Ulsan, a potential site for new plants, collected more than 10,000 signatures opposing additional reactors on safety grounds.
Kim said he did not expect the planned cluster of chip plants in the country’s southwest to require a new nuclear plant, because six reactors already operate there alongside existing solar and wind farms.
Instead, regions such as Seoul, which depend on electricity transmitted from that area, would need additional solar plants or even liquefied natural gas plants, he said.
Other energy sources in South Korea include coal, which accounts for 29% of its power needs currently, while gas accounts for 27%.
The country has 60 coal-fired power plants and aims to phase them out by 2040. That said, 20 of them will still have a legal design lifespan beyond that point in time and one option could be to keep them as emergency backup power.
“It’s a kind of safety power reserve. You never know what might happen, so completely dismantling everything could put us in a difficult situation,” Kim said.
($1 = 1,338.9000 won)
(Reporting by Heejin Kim; Editing by Ed Davies and Edwina Gibbs)
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