South Korea's first Offshore Wind Power Committee approved a fundamental rewrite of how the country builds offshore wind early in September.
AdvertismentThe reform exists because the old model failed, not as a precaution against it failing.
South Korea's offshore wind capacity currently sits at just 0.2 GW — roughly 1% of its own 2030 target of 14.3 GW.
AdvertismentIndia is running the same experiment, with the same result so farIndia's own offshore wind programme is, on the numbers, in a strikingly similar place.
Despite an estimated 70 GW of technical potential off Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, India has yet to commission a single megawatt of offshore wind.
South Korea's first Offshore Wind Power Committee approved a fundamental rewrite of how the country builds offshore wind early in September. instead of developers identifying sites, securing local buy-in and navigating permitting on their own, the government will now designate the zones itself, using wind-resource, environmental, fisheries, maritime-traffic and military data before inviting developers in. The state is targeting 25 GW of preliminary zones by 2031, expected to underpin around 20 GW of actual capacity, with cumulative deployment reaching 45 GW by 2040.
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The reform exists because the old model failed, not as a precaution against it failing. South Korea's offshore wind capacity currently sits at just 0.2 GW — roughly 1% of its own 2030 target of 14.3 GW. Developers spent years navigating up to 29 different regulations across 10 ministries, with final site approval only confirmed at the last possible stage, leaving projects to advance for years without a guaranteed location. The result was chronic delay, local opposition from fishing communities, and a pipeline that never converted into steel in the water.
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India is running the same experiment, with the same result so far
India's own offshore wind programme is, on the numbers, in a strikingly similar place. Despite an estimated 70 GW of technical potential off Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, India has yet to commission a single megawatt of offshore wind. SECI's developer-led tenders — a 4 GW seabed lease off Tamil Nadu and a 500 MW project in the Gulf of Khambhat — were cancelled outright in August 2025 for lack of developer interest, largely because viable tariffs were supposedly ₹9.6/kWh in Tamil Nadu and ₹10.5/kWh in Gujarat, well above prevailing grid tariffs of around ₹7/kWh even after a ₹7,500 crore viability-gap-funding scheme.
MNRE is now preparing a second attempt with a revised Tamil Nadu tender expected in the second half of 2026, once more built around inviting developers to bid on largely pre-identified sites, backed by VGF support rather than a change in who does the site selection and de-risking. A parliamentary Standing Committee review has separately flagged that 92.8% of MNRE's entire budget flows to solar alone, with no dedicated 2026-27 budget line for offshore wind at all, and that India's onshore wind supply chain doesn't extend to offshore-specific components like foundations, subsea cables, offshore substations — all still imported.
The absence of any operating Indian project compounds with underdeveloped ports, grid evacuation capacity, and marine workforce skills, raising the risk premium developers price into their bids.
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The difference South Korea is betting on
Seoul, by making pre-designated, pre-assessed zones that include with fisheries conflicts, environmental review and grid-connection planning resolved before a developer ever bids hopes to remove the years of front-loaded risk that made its own open-door tenders unbankable. GWEC's own read is that this should "significantly reduce permitting timelines for developers opting into the government-led process," just the kind ofuncertainty that priced Indian developers out of Gujarat and Tamil Nadu at the tariffs on offer.
None of this guarantees South Korea's pivot succeeds. The first preliminary zone isn't due until later this year, and operational projects under the new regime aren't expected before 2033. But it is a live test of exactly the fix India's own Standing Committee has implicitly pointed to without India yet attempting it: that de-risking the site, not just subsidising the tariff, may be the precondition offshore wind actually needs before a second Indian tender round fares any better than the first.
