Fields

Reading power · Supply

In 2025, one in every three units of electricity bought and sold in Korea's power market came from nuclear plants — even though nuclear capacity is only a little over half of LNG capacity. And in 7,295 of that year's 8,760 hours, it was an LNG generator that set the wholesale price.

Reading power · Supply

Two power plants sell electricity in the same hour at the same SMP, and are paid different sums. A plant's pay has three lines — the value of the power it made, the value of the capacity it keeps ready, and an adjustment attached to only some plants. The third line never shows on your bill, but it changes the price KEPCO pays for power.

Reading power · Supply

SMP, the wholesale price of electricity set for each hour, is the highest price among the generators in that hour's schedule that are eligible to set the price. The SMP, an annual average of 196.65 won in 2022, came down by more than 40% to 112.72 won in 2025. Even so, the bill you pay at home is charged not at SMP but by a fixed rate table.

Reading power · Supply

\"100 MW solar farm completed.\" \"Work begins on 100 MW gas power plant.\" The two headlines share a number, but the electricity the two plants make in a year is very different. MW is the power a plant can put out at a single moment; MWh is the amount it actually makes. In car terms, it is the difference between engine power and distance driven.

Reading power · Supply

At 3:11 p.m. on September 15, 2011, lights went out one after another all over Korea. It was not a war or a typhoon; there was simply a little too little electricity. That is why a market for a product that is hard to stockpile is shaped differently from an ordinary market.

Reading power · Grid

When you press a switch in the evening, a generator at some far-off power plant works a little harder at that very moment. But there is no way to tell which plant it is. Power from many plants mixes in one web, and that web runs by keeping the amount made and the amount used exactly equal at every moment.

Reading power · Demand

The amount at the bottom of a power bill can be worked out again with one tariff table and a phone calculator. For a home that used 300kWh in October, a few multiplications and additions land at around KRW 57,770. If your own bill is off by a few tens of won, or a few thousand, there is a reason for that gap too.

Reading power · Demand

In September 2026, KEPCO posted its Q4 fuel cost adjustment rate. By the calculation it should have been 7.3 won per kWh, but the last line said 5.0 won. Three months earlier, the rate should have been −3.4 won, yet 5.0 won stayed in place. The two notices look like they broke the formula, but in both, a device written into the terms was at work.

Reading power · Demand

Picture a taxi meter that ticks slowly for the first 200 kWh, faster for the next 200 kWh, and fastest of all above that. That is Korea's progressive tariff for homes, where each unit costs more the more you use. One usage number in the corner of your bill tells you almost everything about how your home's charge was worked out.

Reading power · Demand

When the bill comes, your eyes go straight to the total at the bottom. The lines above it — basic charge, energy charge, climate and environment charge, fuel cost adjustment charge, Electric Power Industry Basis Fund, value-added tax — usually get skipped. Read these six lines apart once, and you can see which line of your bill an "electricity rate hike" story is about.

Reading power · Demand

The same 1 kWh of electricity cost 97.6 Korean won at 4 a.m. and 137.8 won at 7 p.m. Follow the shape of a day and a year to see what makes those 40 won, and the power headlines that come every summer read differently.

Reading power · Overall

One September evening at 7 p.m., you press the rice cooker switch. That hour's September average market price for 1 kWh was 137.8 Korean won, more than the 97.6 won at 4 a.m. Yet on your bill, the hour you used it disappears. What lies in between?