Long Way to Go
The OECD announced on June 26 that the use of renewable energy accounted for only 1.5% of the total energy supply in South Korea in 2015. As a result, the country came in 45th among the 46 countries covered by its recent green growth survey for this year.
According to the survey, the OECD average was 9.6% in 2015 and the average of the 46 including non-OECD member countries was 13.8% during the same period.
The top spot went to Iceland (88.5%) and it was followed by Coast Rica (50.2%), Sweden (45.9%), Norway (44.6%) and New Zealand (40.5%). China and Japan recorded 11.2% and 5.3%, respectively.
That year, coal and crude oil took up 30.6% and 37.2% of the total energy supply in South Korea, respectively. These are the eight- and 17th-highest on the list. In the case of Estonia, coal accounted for 70.8% of its total energy supply. The figures were as high as 69.4% and 65.9% for South Africa and China. Saudi Arabia recorded a renewable energy use of 0% in 2015.
South Korea’s reliance on crude oil fell from 53.5% to 37.2% between 1990 and 2015, but it was still higher than the OECD average (36.1%) and the global average (31.3%). Natural gas represented 14.2% in 2015 in the case of South Korea.
In South Korea, the ratio of renewable energy use to energy supply edged up from 1.1% to 1.5% during the 25-year period. Besides, its ratio of electricity generation based on renewable energy sources fell from 6.04% to 1.42%. The country ranked third when it comes to the scale of economic losses attributable to environmental pollution.