South Korea launches solar tender as RPS phase-out advances

South Korea’s Korea Energy Agency has announced its first-half 2026 solar fixed-price contract tender, expected to open in early June, as legislation to replace the country’s renewable portfolio standard with a government-led auction system advances through the National Assembly.

The Korea Energy Agency (KEA) presented the tender at a briefing in Seoul this week, with applications expected to open in early June and results anticipated by late July. The ceiling price will be announced with the formal tender notice. The 2025 ceiling stood at KRW 155,742 ($103.33)/MWh, down from KRW 157,307/MWh in 2024. THE KEA attributed each reduction to lower PV levelized cost of energy (LCOE) and increased bidding competition.

Carbon emissions from PV modules will for the first time be incorporated as a scored quantitative criterion worth 20 points, rated on a four-tier scale from 630 kg CO₂/kW or below at the top to more than 710 kg CO₂/kW at the bottom. The weighting for bid price has been reduced from 90 to 70 points and a 20-point carbon score added, the KEA said. Floating solar projects will receive 12 additional months to reach commissioning across all capacity brackets above 1 MW. Small-scale applicants holding a KEA financing recommendation letter will be exempt from submitting duplicate documentation.

The KEA’s briefing materials describe the tender as expected to be the final round under the existing framework. Under a proposed overhaul of the Renewable Energy Act, new projects would be required to enter exclusively through a government-run renewables auction system from 2027, with the REC spot market closed to new entrants from that year and abolished by 2029, the agency said. Existing operators would have access to a transition market through 2029. The KEA’s Renewable Energy Centre is designated as the contract market administrator under the proposed amended law.

The legislative basis for that transition remains in progress. A substitute bill abolishing the RPS and replacing it with capacity-based government auctions cleared South Korea’s Climate, Energy, Environment and Labor Committee earlier this month but still requires review by the Legislation and Judiciary Committee and a plenary National Assembly vote. No timetable for those stages has been announced.

Since the fixed-price contract tender system launched in 2017, the KEA has announced a cumulative 14,810 MW of solar capacity across successive rounds and selected a total of 10,638 MW, according to KEA briefing materials. South Korea had approximately 29.5 GW of installed solar capacity at the end of 2024, according to government data. The government is targeting 100 GW of combined solar and wind by 2030.