韩国政府拟年内制定韩电旗下五大发电公企合并重组路线图

The government will draw up plans this year to merge and restructure five power generation companies under the Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO): Korea South-East Power, Korea Midland Power, Korea Western Power, Korea Southern Power and Korea East-West Power. The government is expected to prepare a concrete implementation roadmap, with weight placed on consolidating the five companies into one.
The Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment said Minister Kim Sung-hwan held a "Meeting on Reorganizing the Functions of Power Generation Public Enterprises in the Era of the Great Energy Transition" with the chief executives of the five power generation companies on the 14th at the Han River Flood Control Office in Seocho-gu, Seoul. The meeting was arranged to discuss ways to strengthen the role of power generation public enterprises and the direction of functional reorganization to support this, and to gather the opinions of the five companies in the process of establishing a future restructuring plan.
Earlier, the government held an interim briefing on the "Study on the New Role of Power Public Enterprises in the Energy Transition Period" last month and discussed restructuring plans with the labor unions, management and experts of the five power generation companies. Samil PwC, which was commissioned to conduct the study, examined five alternatives, including merging into one company, consolidating two to three companies by region, and consolidating two to three companies by function. It concluded that a single-company merger was structurally the most appropriate.
At the time, the government said it would establish a restructuring plan for the power generation public enterprises within this month, but there are concerns that it could be pushed back from the original schedule. This is because a mountain of issues remains to be resolved, including whether to push for special legislation for the merger, the transfer of business and raw material supply contracts between the newly launched integrated corporation and the existing power generation public enterprises, labor-management agreements on personnel and wages, and the location of the integrated corporation's headquarters. On this point, Sung Si-kyung, a professor of public policy at Dankook University, suggested at last month's briefing, "Even if a broad direction is presented, the process of merging public enterprises can easily fall apart in the detailed work," and "there needs to be more concrete and substantive discussion."
An official from the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment said, "At the meeting, we held in-depth discussions on matters that need to be reviewed in the future restructuring process," adding, "We will gather a wide range of stakeholder opinions and establish a restructuring plan for the power generation public enterprises within this year."
Meanwhile, the merger of the five power generation companies would be the first in 25 years, since the restructuring of the power industry in 2001. At that time, the government separated KEPCO's power generation division into a total of six entities, including Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and the five power generation public enterprises, saying that competition was limited because KEPCO held a monopoly over all functions such as power generation, transmission, distribution and sales, and citing the goal of promoting efficiency and competition. However, as concerns were raised that the financial structure of the five dispersed power generation companies instead weakened their capacity to mobilize capital for large-scale projects such as offshore wind power and created duplicate costs and research and development (R&D) inefficiencies, the government decided to pursue the merger.