The Korea Forest Service’s flagship Forest Energy Self-Reliance Village in Goesan has idled its cogeneration generator due to a wood chip supply shortfall, leaving the 6.3 billion won ($5.9 million) state-funded build to recover its costs on heating revenue alone over a payback period running past 100 years. That is according to reporting by Chosun Biz, which visited the Jangam-ri Dambau Energy Supply Centre in Jangyeon-myeon on 7 May and inspected the cogeneration plant.
The reporter found the wood chip boiler running on residential heating duty, but the generator stood idle for want of fuel dry enough to meet its 15-per-cent moisture threshold. The stoppage has removed surplus electricity sales from the agency’s original business case for the project.
Total project cost reached 6.3 billion won, drawing 2.2 billion won from the central government, 2.6 billion won from Goesan County and the surrounding North Chungcheong Province, and 1.5 billion won from Korea’s Local Extinction Response Fund earmarked for depopulating rural districts. The completed plant houses two wood chip boilers and a cogeneration generator, supplying heating and hot water to Jangam-ri through a centralised distribution loop covering 60 households.
Residents pay usage-based tariffs that the supply centre says undercut individual heating bills, returning roughly 1 million won per household per year across 60 households — about 60 million won in aggregate annual energy savings. Set against the 6.3 billion won build, those savings deliver a payback period of more than 100 years, well beyond the 20-year design life cited by the Korea Forest Service for wood chip boilers and the 15-year design life for cogeneration equipment.
The surplus electricity sales that the agency factored into its original business case have effectively halted after the project was presented for approval as a route to cut heating bills by using unused biomass while generating profit from exporting surplus power back to the grid. Dust collection upgrades, a carbon recovery system, and mountain-village jobs presented as auxiliary benefits in the original case have similarly failed to materialise at the scale the project anticipated.
Goesan County sought to address the fuel shortage by building a separate Forest Resource Circulation Centre on an adjacent site, designed to produce and dry chips to the 15-per-cent moisture specification required by the cogeneration unit. A budget shortfall left the drying and processing equipment uninstalled, and the building stood empty on the 7 May inspection date with no operational wood chip line feeding the generator.
Bonghwa hosted Korea’s first carbon cycle village trial under a 5.3 billion won (around AUD 5 million) build that was halted within a year of opening due to overlapping fuel costs and design flaws. A separate wood pellet central heating scheme in Hwacheon, Gangwon Province, drew parallel scrutiny when Korea’s National Audit Office described it as a ‘pet complex’ for low operational efficiency.
Notwithstanding those audit findings, the Korea Forest Service has confirmed Yeongdeok in North Gyeongsang Province as the latest site selected for the programme, with a 6.5 billion won (around AUD 6.1 million) budget, including 2.2 billion won in central government funding. The Yeongdeok expansion advances the agency’s domestic biomass priorities as Seoul phases down Renewable Energy Certificate weightings for imported wood pellets, as Wood Central reported.
Park Eun-sik, who visited the Goesan centre as the Korea Forest Service’s deputy director in January and now heads the agency, said the scheme was “a carbon-neutral project to improve the convenience of residents’ lives.”
Seo Seo-won, a professor in the Department of Environmental Engineering at the University of Seoul, told Chosun Biz that the policy intent behind using domestic biomass was sound, but field economics worked against the model. Costs at every stage of the supply chain made it “difficult to expect economic feasibility considering the cost of collecting and transporting raw materials,” Seo said.
The Korea Forest Service has maintained that the scheme belongs in a public-good category that resists profitability-only assessment. An agency official told Chosun Biz the project was “a public project that is difficult to evaluate based on simple profitability.”
The Goesan centre continued supplying heat to 60 households on 7 May, but its cogeneration generator remained stopped, and the adjacent Forest Resource Circulation Centre stood empty — leaving the 6.3 billion won build short of its design output as the Korea Forest Service’s 6.5 billion won Yeongdeok project advances to construction.
