Taean Offshore Wind: Korea's 504 MW Project Racks Up Supply Deals Before It Has a Final Investment Decision

South Korea's 504 MW Taean offshore wind farm has not yet reached a final investment decision (FID). Yet by early November 2026 it had locked in a monopile fabricator, an offshore substation (OSS) builder and now preferential capacity for submarine cables — an unusual sequence that says as much about Korean supply-chain scarcity as it does about the project itself.

The latest step: LS Cable & System and its installation affiliate LS Marine Solution signed a capacity reservation agreement with the project company, Taean Wind Power, securing cable manufacturing slots and cable-laying vessel time ahead of a main supply contract. It builds on LS Cable's selection as preferred submarine cable supplier back in November 2024 — a preference that has now become a ring-fenced booking.

What is actually contracted

Taean is a fixed-bottom, monopile project in the Yellow Sea about 30 km off Taean county in South Chungcheong Province. Public evidence of the commercial package is fragmentary but more complete than for most Korean projects of this size:

Two features stand out. First, the steel-intensive heavy packages — monopiles and the OSS — are the ones already placed, with both going to Korean suppliers. Second, the reservation model now used for cables is a hedge: LS Cable gets volume certainty for fabrication and LS Marine Solution secures vessel days in a market where Korean installation tonnage is tight. Whether it is followed by a firm, priced EPCI-style cable contract remains open.

The monopile order is the clearest commercial signal for steel. GS Entec, a GS Global subsidiary, has expanded annual monopile capacity to about 150,000 t following a roughly KRW 300 billion plant investment, and entered the business via a technology partnership with Dutch foundations specialist Sif. Taean's shallow water and thick sediments are cited as the reason monopiles were chosen over jackets — a design decision that concentrates steel demand in a single fabrication stream and one supplier.

The schedule has moved, and the ownership has changed

Announcements now converge on a later construction window than the one implied by the 2024 offtake award. Vena Energy and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) said in early 2025 that they targeted construction start in the second half of 2026 and commercial operation by late 2029. Korean press coverage of the GS Entec award in September 2026 described construction starting in 2028 and completion in 2030. Those are not reconcilable without an unexplained delay; readers should treat 2028–2030 as the current working window and expect more precision only once FID is announced.

The ownership picture is also not static — a point that matters for anyone tracking who will actually place the remaining orders. CIP acquired 49% in late 2024, with Vena Energy holding the balance. In July 2026, Korea Western Power (KOWEPO), a state-owned generator, signed a public–private joint development agreement with Vena and CIP. Korea Wind Intel reports a resulting split of Vena 37.5% / CIP 37.5% / KOWEPO 25%; that split has not been confirmed against a shareholder register, and KOWEPO's exact stake, timing and method should be treated as reported rather than settled.

KOWEPO's entry is more than a balance-sheet change. The project intends to reuse spare transmission capacity from Taean Thermal Power Unit 1, a 500 MW coal unit that closed at the end of 2025, and to convert a small jetty inside the coal plant into an O&M base port. KOWEPO has signalled plans for about 1.4 GW of offshore wind in the Taean area and has an agreement with its union and CIP on retraining coal-plant workers. That grid-reuse and just-transition framing is likely to matter as much to permitting and local acceptance as to economics.

Why the project matters beyond itself

Taean sits at the intersection of three Korean policy threads. It holds a 20-year fixed-price offtake contract awarded in the Korea Energy Agency's 2024 auction, which cleared 2,085 MW nationally against an offshore price ceiling of KRW 176,565/MWh (roughly EUR 123/MWh at the time) — a structure that gives lenders revenue certainty but leaves room for cost overruns to bite into returns. It recycles retiring coal infrastructure, a model Seoul is promoting for coastal sites. And it is being built almost entirely on a domestic supply chain: Korean monopiles, Korean OSS, Korean cables. For suppliers, that is both an advantage and a constraint — the project is a reference case for whether Korea's fabrication base can now absorb serial offshore work.

What remains open

The turbine OEM is the biggest commercial hole. No award is publicly confirmed; the Korea Power Exchange's project status list still shows the manufacturer as undecided, and a Samsung Securities research note associating Taean with SG 14 MW machines should be read as a planning assumption, not a contract. Given 37 monopiles for 504 MW — implying roughly 13.6 MW per unit — a large-frame machine is clearly intended, but the commercial terms, nacelle localisation commitments and any steel content (towers are separate from monopiles and not yet placed) are unresolved.

The EPCI contractor for installation and balance of plant is also unidentified. For the cable package, the reservation does not disclose lengths, types or the eventual contract value. And there is no public FID. Until that is documented, the supplier reservations — including the new LS capacity booking — are best understood as a developer securing scarce slots ahead of a decision, not evidence that the decision has been made.

Facts above are drawn from developer and government announcements and trade press; ownership percentages, the 2028–2030 schedule and the absence of a turbine award are reported or inferred and should be verified against corporate records and KPX filings before being relied on commercially.