The Yongin Semiconductor Cluster is facing difficulties in securing stable power supply. The industrial area will include the world’s largest advanced semiconductor production facility and more than 200 fabless, materials, parts and equipment companies.
The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) of Korea along with officials from KEPCO and the semiconductor industr visited the proposed site for the Yongin System Semiconductor Cluster on Sept. 12 to discuss ways to cooperate in supplying power to it. The cluster is expected to need more than 10 gigawatts (GW) of power in 2050. This is a follow-up to the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster Power Supply Meeting held in July which was chaired by the minister of land, infrastructure, and transport and attended by executives from the ministry, KEPCO, Samsung Electronics, and SK hynix.
Stable power supply holds the key to the success of the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster. The Korean government and the Korean semiconductor industry anticipate demand for more than 10 GW of electricity in 2050, when the cluster is established and corporate investments are finalized. The volume is about a quarter of the Seoul metropolitan area’s current demand for electric power.
In response, the government and KEPCO are pushing forward with a plan to build an LNG power plant in the industrial park, which could be built in two to three years, to provide electricity for the cluster’s early years. It usually takes two to three years to build an LNG power plant. Their plan is to build six LNG power plants to supply the cluster with 3 GW of electricity first and 10 GW by 2042 when all five semiconductor factories will go live in the cluster. They believe that the creation of the cluster is impossible without LNG power plants.
However, the Carbon Neutrality Committee of the Democratic Party of Korea held a press conference on Sept. 12 to claim that the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster is ignoring the global trend of RE100. The committee demanded that the government and KEPCO scrap the plan to build LNG power plants in the cluster. It called for a renewable energy supply plan instead of the new LNG plant plan because LNG power plants are not recognized by RE100.
“The MOTIE has failed to prepare a renewable energy supply plan in preparation for the full implementation of RE100 and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism,” the committee said. “The electric power to be produced by solar power generation facilities in industrial parks is only 70 MW, which is less than 1 percent of the demand (10 GW) for electric power from the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster. The creation of a system semiconductor industrial park in Yongin will only worsen overcrowding and hyper-concentration problems in the already saturated Seoul metropolitan area.”
Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, the two main players of the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster, have declared that they will follow the RE100 initiative, setting the target of getting electric power from renewable sources in 2050. Accordingly, even if the Korean government proceeds with the construction of the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster with LNG power plants, it will face the challenge of gradually building a long-distance transmission network to expand the supply of electric power from renewable energy sources. Global companies such as Apple are pressuring their semiconductor partners to meet the RE100 standards in line with the global RE100 trend. Unless Korean chipmakers properly implement RE100, they will suffer a drop of 31 percent in semiconductor exports, some analysts say.