Segmenting the South Korean Public According to Their Preferred Direction for Electricity Mix Reform

Qingchang Li,Seungkook Roh,Jin Won Lee

doi:10.3390/su12219053

Qingchang Li, Seungkook Roh + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su12219053

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Abstract

The current South Korean government headed by President Moon Jae-in has put a great deal of effort into electricity mix reform by pushing forward the phasing out of coal and nuclear power and the expansion of natural gas and new renewable energy in the country’s electricity generation processes. Noting the importance of understanding public responses to energy policy, the present study segmented the South Korean public according to their preferred direction for electricity mix reform using a nationwide sample. Through a series of latent class analyses, we extracted four distinct segments: Gradual Reformists, Drastic Reformists, Selective Gradual Reformists, and Status-quo Seekers. Overall, apart from the Status-quo Seekers segment (8.75%), support for the transition from coal and nuclear power to natural gas and new renewable energy seems to be the prevailing opinion of the Korean public. However, the degree of such preferences varies across the segments. In addition, regardless of the segment, the South Korean public generally seems to categorize the energy sources in a manner consistent with the underlying framework of the government’s electricity mix reform: they tend to treat coal and nuclear power similarly and natural gas and new renewable energy similarly.

Highlights

Over the last decades of compressed economic development, Korea had been using fossil fuel generation, which has been economically viable while entailing low technological difficulty, as a basic option to meet the electricity demand
Korea has been striving to expand nuclear power generation in the long run to reduce its dependence on fossil fuel
In Korea, nuclear power generation has been an icon of the era, symbolizing the nation’s technological independence and energy security [51]

Summary

Introduction

The international community’s efforts to mitigate climate change (e.g., the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement) have accelerated the worldwide trend to shift to a low-carbon economy [1]. This shift necessitates either (1) capturing and isolating carbon dioxide that is a byproduct of large point sources, such as factories or power plants, via methods such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) [2,3], (2) reducing the by-production of carbon dioxide itself, or (3) involving both strategies. Thereby, reforming the electricity mix ( referred to as the electricity generation mix or power generation mix), which refers to the combination of various primary sources used to generate electricity in a given region, is necessary [7,8,9]

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