South Korea offers to fix the North’s electricity

If Kim scraps his nuclear weapons program, Chung told him, South Korea will provide 2 million kilowatts of electricity each year, nearly doubling the North’s power supply. Making details of the plan public last week, Seoul insisted Kim had promised to look at the offer “seriously.”

A crippling energy shortage could be the regime’s Achilles heel. North Korea currently generates 2.3 million kilowatts annually, about half of what it needs to keep its trains and factories running and cities lit at night. As much as a third of that is believed to leak during transmission. Some power equipment is more than 60 years old. Theft of copper and aluminum transmission lines for sale as scrap in China is rampant, even though it’s a capital offense. Says Han Young Jin, who worked as an electrical engineer in Pyongyang before defecting to Seoul in 2002: “The grid is a mess.” Seoul estimates that building the extra generating capacity and lines needed would cost $1.7 billion, but the final price could be many times higher. Turning on the power could cause the North’s dilapidated grid to melt down, so South Korea might have to rebuild that as well, at a cost of billions more.


TIME Asia Magazine