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| Wind turbines are operating behind solar energy farms in Hasa-ri, Yeonggwang County, South Jeolla Province, June 8. Korea Times photo by Seo Jae-hoon |
By Kang Hyun-kyung
The government's ambitious but unorganized campaign to achieve net zero by 2050 in order to control greenhouse gas emissions has created unintended consequences.
The nation's salt farms are disappearing. Soil erosion is another problem created by the reckless green energy push. Residents in the neighborhood of photovoltaic power stations, or "solar energy farms," installed on mountaintops live in fear of landslides.
In the coastal counties of the southwest that were once home to premium salt, solar energy farms are rapidly replacing salt farms.
Scenes captured in Hankook Ilbo photos taken on June 8 in Yeonggwang County, located in the northwestern part of South Jeolla Province, show a dramatic shift of the region from salt farms to solar energy farms. Wind turbines were established in the fields, mountains and wetlands, and the coastal areas, which once housed salt farms, are now covered with solar panels.
Enticed by generous tax benefits and expected higher revenues, landowners have stopped renting out their lands to tenant salt farmers, and have begun to install solar panels on their properties, pushing the salt farmers out of business. Being laid off and losing their source of income, these farmers are finding it difficult to make ends meet.
In the Hasa-ri region, there used to be 16 salt farms. But now all of them have been replaced with solar energy farms.
The dramatic transformation from salt farms to solar energy farms is also happening in other southern locales that have long produced salt. In Sinan County, for example, solar energy farms were installed on a total of 800,000 square meters of territory last year. Now solar energy farms have more than doubled, stretching out over 1.7 million square meters of land.
The preferred locations for salt farms and solar energy farms are identical. Sunny and windy places are preferred. Their shared conditions have pushed less profitable salt farms out of business as the solar energy farms are coming in.
The nation's "Green New Deal," which includes a major renewable energy push, ironically, is destroying delicate natural and traditional ecosystems. In the southern county of Jangsu, mountain trees and plants were cut down in order to create space for solar energy farms. The indiscriminate destruction of such mountain forest ecosystems triggered landslides in Jangsu County twice recently ― first in 2019 and then in 2020 during the summer monsoon season. Residents of the region, mostly elderly farmers, live in fear of these human-made disasters.
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