South Korea remains the weakest performer within OECD in terms of renewables’ penetration into the national energy matrix, merely 5% of its electricity generation boils down to green energy. Apart from Seoul’s post-Fukushima travails with its nuclear fleet, the Asian nation has traditionally depended on coal to satisfy its ever-increasing energy needs, to the extent that in the 2010s South Korea was the fourth-largest coal importer globally, behind China, India, and Japan. Considering that South Korea has minimal domestic production capacities, importing coal has developed a strong interconnectedness with LNG prices, coal’s main competitor for domestic generation capacities. It is all the more peculiar that today, in the midst of Seoul’s renewables drive, coal has almost bounced back to its pre-COVID heights. Graph 1. South Korea’s Coal Imports in 2017-2021 (million tons per month). Source: Thomson Reuters. South Korea’s coal imports have averaged 10.5-11 million tons per month in […]