FORT LEE, N.J. — Before he said a word about power plants, Sihyoung Lee asked a room of students and parents whether they had heard about BTS's comeback concert. Some had. It was staged at Gwanghwamun, he reminded them — not one of the four great gates in the old walls of Hanyang, as Seoul was once called, but the main gate of Gyeongbokgung Palace. And Gyeongbokgung, he said, is where electricity first came to Korea.

In early 1887, lamps powered by generating equipment contracted through Thomas Edison's company lit Geoncheonggung, a royal residence inside the palace grounds. Korean accounts commonly give the date as March 6; South Korea's national heritage research institute places the first lighting between January and March of that year. Lee told the audience it came about eight years after Edison's incandescent lamp and about five years after commercial electric service began in New York. By his count, it also preceded comparable palace installations in China and Japan by roughly two years.

That opening framed the Korea Energy Seminar, held Sept. 30, 2026, at Mom & I Studio in Fort Lee under the theme Clean Energy, Sustainable Korea, Brighter Tomorrow. Three specialists spoke, mostly in Korean, while questions and summaries were also relayed in English for a mixed audience of students and parents. The program was recorded, and the moderator told students they could rewatch it on YouTube whenever their own energy ran low.

Lee, a senior manager at the Korea Chamber of Commerce & Industry, spoke first, on the history of Korea's energy industry and its current policy. Sungmin Woo, a principal researcher with the Solar Energy Industry Team at Chungbuk Technopark who holds a doctorate in electrical engineering and specializes in power systems, followed with the grid and renewable technology. Jeongwoo Lee, a general manager at Korea Energy Carbon Management (KECM), a consulting firm that advises on energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction, closed with resource circulation and waste.

Their subjects differed, but they converged on one problem. A country that once struggled simply to obtain electricity must now rebuild the system that supplies it — what it burns, how it moves power and what it does with what it discards — without weakening the industries that depend on it.

During the question period, an audience member asked what that first palace lighting had actually been like. Lee said the lamps arrived with their own generator, installed nearby. "That small generator made an enormous amount of noise as it ran," he said, "and there are stories that people were a little frightened of it."

Within a decade, electricity had begun to leave the palace. On Jan. 26, 1898, Hanseong Electric Company was founded with the backing of Emperor Gojong — the company that Korea Electric Power Corp., the national utility, now treats as its origin, as Lee noted. Streetcars began running in Seoul in May 1899, and the first public street lamps were lit along Jongno in April 1900.

Lee divided the century that followed into four periods: building, losing and rebuilding infrastructure through Japanese colonial rule and the Korean War; an oil-dependent economy shaken by the supply crises of the 1970s; a long push for stable, secure supply; and the present, in which climate change is reshaping policy. Korea has almost no fossil fuel resources of its own — it has no proven oil reserves, imports nearly all of its oil and natural gas, and its small domestic gas field stopped producing in 2021 — so for decades, Lee said, import prices and world events dictated its choices. Now the question that matters most, he said, is how cleanly the country can produce its electricity.

His slides traced how quickly Korea's per-capita GDP and electricity use rose together. Semiconductor fabs, steel mills and petrochemical plants run around the clock, and Korea packs that industrial base and a dense population onto a small land area. The point of the charts, Lee said, was to show why Korea cares so much about what it generates its power from. The direction of policy was his answer: less coal and natural gas, more nuclear and renewable energy.

He was blunt about where demand is heading. "The world you will live in will become more and more electrified," he told the students, "and the electricity industry will grow far more than it has." Homes that once burned coal and then gas or oil for heat are turning to electric heating and induction cooktops; cars are going electric. Artificial intelligence adds to the load. "The more we use AI, the more electricity we use — an enormous amount," Lee said. "Are we going to supply it the old way — to put it simply, dirty? No." AI that runs on clean energy, he said, will matter more and more — and for students weighing careers, he suggested, the power sector is a field worth a look.

One audience member, citing Korea's KSTAR fusion research device, asked whether fusion energy was part of the country's 2050 carbon-neutrality plan. Not yet, Lee said. "It will succeed someday, but applying a technology that is still being developed right now would be a stretch." National planning, he explained, relies on technologies that work today, such as renewables and conventional nuclear power.

Small modular reactors, Lee said, have no demonstrated case yet and are expected to reach demonstration around 2030 to 2035. That holds for Korea and for most of the West, though not everywhere: Russia has operated a 70-megawatt floating reactor since 2020, China's 210-megawatt HTR-PM began operating in 2023, and China's Linglong One was scheduled to enter commercial service in 2026. Korea's own design, the i-SMR, was submitted for standard design approval in February 2026; its developers are aiming for approval in 2028 and a first commercial unit around 2035, a schedule regulators have cautioned could slip.

Asked how strict Korean policy has become, Lee said it is moving in a firmly stricter direction, with coal plants being closed or denied extensions. Nuclear policy, he said, is focused on strengthening safety, while renewables are being expanded quickly.

Those directions are written into South Korea's 11th Basic Plan for Electricity Supply and Demand, finalized in February 2025. It projects that by 2038 nuclear power would supply about 35.2 percent of the country's electricity, renewables about 29.2 percent, liquefied natural gas about 10.6 percent, coal about 10.1 percent and clean hydrogen and ammonia about 6.2 percent, and it calls for two new large reactors and one small modular reactor. Those figures are planning projections, not commitments that build themselves. Each depends on investment, permits, construction schedules and fuel markets — and the government spent 2026 drafting a successor 12th plan, which had not been finalized as of publication.

Woo told the audience he chose Benjamin as his English name after Benjamin Franklin — a natural pick, he said, for someone who studied electrical engineering. He opened with satellite images of the Korean Peninsula at night, comparing the 1960s with 2025. South Korea now blazes with light. Above it, North Korea is almost entirely dark, with Pyongyang a small bright exception — a picture, Woo said, of the economic gap between the two.

He then walked through how electricity reaches a home. Edison's systems ran on direct current, which in that era could not be efficiently raised to high voltage and so could not carry power very far from a generating station. Alternating current — associated with Nikola Tesla and commercialized by George Westinghouse — solved that with the transformer, which steps voltage up for long-distance transmission and back down for safe use. "If you double the voltage, losses fall by a factor of four," Woo explained. The physics holds: for the same power, doubling the voltage halves the current, and resistive losses scale with the square of the current. Today, high-voltage direct current has returned for some long-distance lines, using modern converter stations.

Near the customer, transformers bring the voltage down — to 220 volts in Korean homes and, as Woo put it, about 110 volts in American ones. The U.S. standard is formally 120 volts, delivered through a 120/240-volt split-phase service.

Woo said Korea's power system rests on three pillars that must grow together: renewable energy, the grid and the electrification of everything that now runs on other fuels. The grid is where the strain shows first. Korea's large coal and gas plants sit along the coast, as do its nuclear plants, while the Seoul metropolitan area uses the most power. Electricity has to be moved to the capital region, and that requires transmission lines that are difficult to build. "You have to resolve a lot of complaints and issues with local residents," Woo said, "so these usually have to be planned ten years ahead."

Recent projects bear him out. A 345-kilovolt line from Bukdangjin to Sintangjeong ran about 150 months behind schedule, and the high-voltage direct-current link meant to carry power from the east coast to the Seoul area was about 82 months late as of mid-2025, according to Korean press accounts citing the national utility, after disputes over permits and a substation expansion near Seoul.

The consequences reach the newest kind of customer. A data center built in the Seoul area, Woo said, cannot simply be connected to the grid right away, which is why operators are increasingly installing solar panels or fuel cells nearby to supply part of their power directly. Policy has moved the same way: since June 2024, Korea's distributed-energy law has required large new loads to pass a grid-impact assessment that rewards projects able to generate much of their own power.

Woo also explained how Korea decides which plants run. In his account, nuclear — the cheapest source to operate — runs as the base, followed by coal, then gas, with renewables, still more expensive in Korea, on top. That ordering needs one qualification. In a merit-order system, solar and wind have almost no fuel cost and generally run whenever the sun shines or the wind blows; their higher cost in Korea shows up in up-front investment and in support payments rather than in the order of dispatch. Woo said Korea's cost-based pool, in which generators are paid according to regulated estimates of their variable costs, is likely to move over time toward a price-bidding market like the wholesale markets in much of the United States, including PJM, which serves New Jersey.

The grid is also where Korea and the United States meet commercially. Much of the U.S. transmission network is old, Woo said, and AI-driven data center demand is climbing. Large Korean makers of grid equipment, he said, already have nearly three years' worth of U.S. export orders lined up. Company filings point in the same direction: HD Hyundai Electric reported a record order backlog of about $7.9 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2026, with more than 70 percent of that quarter's new orders coming from North America.

Audience members pressed on the limits of renewables. What happens at night, or on a rainy day? Woo pointed to energy storage — the same principle, he said, as the battery in a phone — as one of the fastest-growing parts of the industry, and to hydrogen as an intermediate step on the road to fusion. He showed a chart projecting solar output in Texas from 2021 to 2035 to illustrate why: as daytime solar grows, the need to store that power for evening grows with it. Storage has its own limits — batteries typically cover hours rather than days — and hydrogen loses energy at each conversion, so its value depends heavily on how it is produced.

Woo's core answer was diversification. "Energy is better when it's diverse," he said. If a war cut off oil, he explained, a country would need something else on hand to keep power flowing. Reliability, in other words, comes less from any single technology than from a mix in which dependable capacity, transmission access and storage cover one another's gaps — installed solar capacity on its own does not guarantee power at 7 p.m. in January.

On technology, Woo said Korea and China lead in solar manufacturing and that Korea is developing perovskite solar cells that could push efficiency well beyond today's panels. Laboratory perovskite-silicon tandem cells have already exceeded the practical efficiency ceiling of conventional silicon, though questions of durability and mass production remain. Higher efficiency matters in a country short on land, because it means more power from less space. In wind, Woo said, China is further ahead, which is one reason Korea is concentrating on solar. With so little land, he added, Korea — whose shipbuilders are among the world's leaders — is looking to the sea as the next place to put solar panels, beginning with floating installations.

Not every question was about national strategy. Asked about the drawbacks of solar for a household, Woo said panels produce the most power when they face south. Many roofs do not. "First," he advised, "check whether your house faces south."

He also tied renewables directly to trade. Global companies such as Apple and Google are moving to renewable power, Woo said, and Korean suppliers — like suppliers everywhere — will increasingly need to use renewable energy to keep selling to them. Apple, for one, has asked its suppliers to decarbonize their Apple-related production by 2030, and more than 300 manufacturers had committed to doing so by 2023.

Jeongwoo Lee, the last of the three speakers, said he had arrived in New Jersey only two or three days earlier and had spent the time walking the streets, eating out and watching how Americans throw things away. His conclusion was diplomatic: policy and reality, he said, seem to have something of a gap.

He began by asking the audience what came to mind when they heard the word trash. Dirty, mostly — something nobody wants to get near. By the end of his talk, he promised, they would look into their own trash cans and think about what was inside, though not too closely, he added, or their parents would worry.

His argument was that waste is now an energy and climate question. Korea's waste volumes and treatment costs keep rising, and with them pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, so no single treatment technology can solve the problem. Waste, he explained, can travel two broad paths. It can return to circulation through reduction, reuse and recycling, or it can be turned into energy through incineration heat or biogas. Within a hierarchy that puts prevention and reuse first, deciding which path a given material should take is the central question.

He described four routes in use in Korea. Plastics and metals are recycled into raw material. Food waste and sewage sludge are converted into biogas or compost. Combustible residues are burned to recover heat, electricity and steam. And, increasingly, waste plastic is converted into chemical feedstock through pyrolysis oil or synthetic gas.

None of these routes is automatically green. Anaerobic digestion can capture methane that would otherwise escape from rotting food, but only if the feedstock is clean and the plant runs well. Waste-to-energy plants recover useful heat and power, but they emit carbon dioxide and air pollutants that must be controlled, and they leave ash to manage; burning a material that could have been recycled forfeits most of its value. Chemical recycling can handle plastics that mechanical recycling cannot, but its benefit depends on its energy use and on where the output goes — turning plastic into fuel that is later burned is very different from returning it to manufacturing as new plastic.

That is why, Jeongwoo Lee said, choosing among the routes requires answering three questions: whether a technology fits the waste and the infrastructure available, whether there is real market demand for what it produces, and whether it actually reduces emissions and environmental harm.

He took the audience on a virtual tour of a plastics recycling plant — normally, he joked, a place that requires a hard hat. Plastics are recycled in three ways: mechanically, chemically and thermally. The mechanical process begins with sorting. Asked how many kinds of plastic there are, the mothers in the room seemed to know right away, he noted; there are many, sorted by resin type such as PP, PE and PET. The sorted plastic is washed, shredded and melted, then extruded into flakes or pellets that manufacturers can turn back into products.

Korea built its system in layers, he said: separate collection and recycling in the 1990s, anchored by a pay-as-you-throw fee on trash introduced in 1995; extended producer responsibility, which makes manufacturers responsible for recycling their packaging, introduced in 2003; a Framework Act on Resource Circulation in force since 2018; and, most recently, legislation on transitioning to a circular economy. Korea, he said, combines regulation with industrial policy, using markets, technology and regulatory exemptions together.

He did his homework on New Jersey, too. The state, he found, has issued a substantial body of policy on recycling and plastic waste, including legal requirements that steadily raise the share of recycled plastic in new products. That matches the record: New Jersey's 1987 mandatory recycling law was the first of its kind statewide in the country, and a 2022 law requires rigid plastic containers to contain at least 10 percent post-consumer recycled content, rising in steps to 50 percent by 2036.

For the future, Jeongwoo Lee said, the order of priorities stays the same: reduce and reuse first, then sort recyclables for high quality, then build markets for recycled raw materials, with energy recovery as a further step — all of it, in the end, for the climate and the environment.

His closing line was the one he wanted the audience to keep. "Waste is not the end," he said. "It is a starting point."

The sharpest exchange came from the audience. A New Jersey resident described recycling rules that vary from town to town, collection handled by a private hauler rather than the municipality, and neighbors in a shared building who put ordinary trash into recycling bins even though only plastics numbered 1, 2 and 5 are accepted. Korea, the resident said, started serious recycling in the 1990s and made it work. How could that experience help speed things up here?

"There is an uncomfortable truth here," Jeongwoo Lee replied. Having studied recycling facilities, he said, PET bottles — water bottles, mostly — are recycled most successfully because they arrive the least contaminated; polypropylene and other plastics often come in dirty. "It doesn't work just by sorting it," he said. To become raw material again, plastic has to be recycled in a clean, pure state. He added that Korea sometimes imports waste plastic for recycling, which suggests that clean feedstock has real economic value. Managed well, he said, waste becomes a resource.

Sihyoung Lee offered a second answer. "Children can change their behavior through education," he said. "With adults, it's more important to create an economic impact." That means building social costs into prices — making it more expensive to throw things away than to recycle, as Korea does with its pay-per-bag trash system, or making landfilling costly. Korea, he noted, also puts a price on carbon emissions, through an emissions trading system launched in 2015, and some American states, such as California, do the same. New Jersey participates in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade program for power plants. Making the economics work, Lee said, is what creates the market.

Another exchange turned to data centers. One audience member argued that New Jersey, next to New York and the state where Edison did his work, has unusual potential to attract them, and that Korea, practiced at building upward on scarce, expensive land, might have something to offer. Sihyoung Lee agreed that land is Korea's central constraint: it is among the most densely populated and expensive countries in the world, which brings conflicts with residents and costly compensation for new facilities. High-efficiency solar and energy storage, he said, are the areas Korea is developing to get more from less space, and areas where cooperation with New Jersey could be meaningful.

A panelist then cautioned that the goal should be clear first. "If the goal is simply to attract data centers that use a lot of energy — data centers coming doesn't mean many people come to work there," he said. Because they use so much power, "there are cases where it is actually a loss." The warning has local resonance. PJM, the grid operator serving New Jersey, has attributed much of its recent demand growth to data centers, and its 2025 capacity auction cleared at a record price after New Jersey bills had already risen about 20 percent that summer.

Korea favors solar, the panelist explained, partly because making panels is manufacturing that creates jobs and supports suppliers of equipment, materials and parts. With little open land, Korea installs panels on the roofs of industrial complexes and on farmland in ways that let crops keep growing beneath them, so that farmers earn additional income from the power.

Closing his part of the discussion, Sihyoung Lee said Korea's energy industry had changed as fast as its economy, weathering repeated crises along the way, and that the experience should help it respond to climate change — and open business opportunities that students would do well to watch.

In 1887, the challenge was to make electricity available at all. The speakers in Fort Lee described a different one: keeping power reliable while changing what produces it, building transmission lines that can take more than a decade to finish and treating discarded material as an input rather than an endpoint.

Closing the program, the organizers said they hoped to make the seminar a regular series. Korea's first electric light came from Edison's company, they reminded the audience. Nearly 140 years later, the conversation about what comes next took place in New Jersey, where Edison did much of his work.

About this article: This report is based on a recording of the Korea Energy Seminar held Sept. 30, 2026, at Mom & I Studio in Fort Lee, N.J. Remarks delivered in Korean were translated by KORISE/Mom&I. Context on energy policy, grid projects, industry data and recycling law was added from public sources. The seminar was hosted at a studio affiliated with KORISE/Mom&I.