To mitigate climate change and achieve carbon neutrality, the world is expanding renewable energy, leading to a global surge in its adoption. Renewable energy is also emerging as a means of addressing energy crises, achieving energy security, and pre-empting new industries, and these roles are expected to continue expanding in the future. However, conflicts related to public acceptance, such as environmental and landscape impacts, are arising globally in the process of expanding renewable energy, acting as a major hindrance to its growth.
In the Republic of Korea, conflicts related to public acceptance are also occurring in the process of installing renewable energy facilities, along with conflicts related to grid integration due to regional concentration and insufficient system capacity. Additionally, conflicts may spread in the utilization phase due to increased demand for renewable energy in the industrial sector, driven by global carbon trade barriers such as the spread of RE100 and the introduction of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). Considering the importance of renewable energy in achieving national carbon neutrality goals and enhancing industrial competitiveness, it is necessary to prepare proactive response measures through systematic analysis and consideration of these conflicts.
To this end, the National Assembly Futures Institute aims to comprehensively examine potential renewable energy conflict issues at each stage of deployment (power generation), transmission and distribution (grid integration), and utilization (consumption), and propose institutional measures for conflict response and management from a renewable energy activation perspective.
Through text mining analysis and focus group interviews (FGI) with experts, conflict issues at each stage of renewable energy were identified, and the points of contention, causes of conflict, and stakeholders were analyzed. The roles of the National Assembly and government in mitigating and resolving conflicts were considered. A survey was conducted targeting major stakeholders in domestic renewable energy conflicts, such as renewable energy power generation companies and RE100 participating companies, to investigate experiences and perceptions of conflicts and demand for related policies. Additionally, by referencing cases of conflict status and management systems in major foreign countries like Germany, Denmark, France, and Japan, three institutional measures for responding to renewable energy conflicts were proposed:
① Establishing a professional conflict mediation body for systematic conflict management
② Improving the systematic nature of renewable energy policies
③ Introducing public discourse procedures in the energy policy-making process to prevent conflicts
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