Thread by @SStapczynski

South Korea’s Jeju island is a net-zero cautionary tale 🇰🇷🌳

A decade ago, it set a goal to become independent of fossil fuels by 2030

But halfway through, Jeju is way behind. Emissions rose and it isn’t producing enough clean energy

@HEESU_LEE

bloomberg.com/news/features/…

But there may be at least as much to learn from failure as from success 💡

These are Jeju’s two biggest sources of rising CO2 emissions:

1) Gasoline-powered vehicles, which accounted for nearly 37% in 2019

2) Fossil fuel-based power generation, which contributed 26%

To tackle gasoline vehicles, Jeju island encouraged EV adoption and more sources of renewable power. The government provided subsidies and tax breaks

It assumed that an increase in both would crowd out traditional cars and fuel. It hasn’t, and gas-powered cars has increased 🚗

Then there’s the problem of batteries 🔋

Jeju government agreed to own the batteries (most expensive part of an EV) to help reduce costs

But now the batteries have run their course. There’s no local way to dispose/recycle of spent batteries, and shipping to mainland is costly

Geographically, Jeju is the best place in Korea to harvest wind power 🌬

But residents pay Korea’s highest energy costs, because they rely on shipped diesel or natural gas

Jeju has renewable capacity of 828MW, just 22% of what it says it will need by the end of the decade

Worse yet, Jeju couldn’t even use all the renewable energy it did produce ⚡️

Funneling it into the existing grid could have overloaded the infrastructure, so the island was forced to curtail the excess

More than 19 GWh of electricity was lost from curtailments in 2020

The island can’t simply switch off thermal and gas-based generators to accommodate renewable energy because it can make the whole grid unstable

Without an adequate utility-scale battery storage facility on the island, there’s little the government can do

The fact that Jeju is facing stark challenges even absent heavy industry should be a warning for Korea, said Lee Yong Jae, a professor emeritus at Chung-Ang University who has studied the island’s energy transition plan

His full quote here 👇

Islands like Naoshima and Jeju are appealing laboratories for experiments like this

If these projects can be successful, the thinking goes, the efforts can be scaled up and replicated on the mainland 👀