Cattle farmers in Korea reeling from solar panel policy

By Hankookilbo

• Published Oct 25, 2026 12:00 AM KST

At noon on Aug. 6 in a rural village in Naju, Jeonnam-Gwangju Special Metropolitan City, a thermal imaging drone camera showed the home and Korean cattle barn of Kim Young-hee, 73, and her husband, Lim Jae-yeol, 70, glowing red like a blazing heat island.

Surrounded on all sides by three solar power plants that resembled a black sea, their home was trapped in the middle, with its roof surface temperature soaring to as high as 65 degrees Celsius. The nearest solar panels extended almost to the boundary of their yard, just 3 to 5 meters from the front door.

“When the sun rises in summer, both inside and outside our house become an unbearable sauna. Sweat makes it impossible to keep my eyes open, so I flee to the village community center during the day. As soon as the sun comes up, I get so dizzy and develop such severe headaches that I simply cannot endure it. This is something that kills people — a ‘torture device.’ Government officials say solar power poses no scientifically proven problems, but when I am suffering like this right in front of my kitchen window, how persuasive can that science possibly be?”

Beneath the scorching roof, the cattle barn that provided the couple’s livelihood was also suffering. Kim said the conception rate among their breeding cows had been cut in half, and 30 head of cattle, including sensitive young calves, died one after another last winter.

What makes their predicament particularly distressing is that the couple are what have come to be called “renewable energy refugees.” They fled wind turbines only to find themselves surrounded by solar panels. The couple previously ran a Korean cattle farm for years in another area of Jeonnam-Gwangju Special Metropolitan City.

They said they suffered from low-frequency noise and livestock deaths after a large wind farm was built on a nearby mountain. Eventually, they left the farm they had grown attached to and, hoping to raise cattle in peace, carefully checked whether there were any renewable energy facilities nearby before buying land in Daesan-ri, Naju, in 2017. But once again, they found themselves trapped, this time by solar panels installed right outside their home.

Naju City’s urban planning ordinance prohibited solar power facilities within 100 meters of residential property boundaries; the distance was extended to 200 meters in April 2021. The nearby solar power facility received development approval in April 2020. The architectural firm hired by the couple had applied for a building permit for their home in January that year but withdrew the application just two hours after filing it.

The couple said they did not learn about the solar project until August 2020, when their house was nearly complete. Kim said she filed a criminal complaint, but no charges were handed down. The city maintains that the solar project’s development approval preceded the residential building permit and therefore did not violate the setback ordinance. The city arranged several meetings between Kim and the project operator, but they failed to reach an agreement over relocation assistance. Instead, the operator proposed measures such as installing a small solar power system on the couple’s roof.

Kim staged a one-person protest in front of Naju City Hall for more than two years. In October 2024, the project operator filed a 50 million won ($36,000) damages lawsuit against her, alleging that her complaints and obstruction of construction had delayed the power plant’s operation by more than two years.

The problem is that the revised setback rules have left cases like the couple’s without protection.

An enforcement decree amended under the Act on the Promotion of the Development, Use and Diffusion of New and Renewable Energy, which took effect Sept. 18, allows local governments to impose residential setback requirements for solar power facilities only when at least five houses are clustered together. In areas where four or fewer homes stand apart from one another, solar panels can be installed right up to a front door without being subject to a setback requirement. Farmers’ groups say the change ignores the realities of rural communities, where homes are often scattered across the landscape, and expands regulatory blind spots.

Wind power is subject to similar restrictions. The revised decree caps residential setbacks for wind turbines at 1,500 meters, but, as with solar power, protection applies only where at least five homes are clustered together. Song Jeong-eum, 70, lives in Beombawi Village, Unnam-myeon in Muan County, Jeonnam-Gwangju Special Metropolitan City, about 280 meters from a wind farm built after receiving approval in 2021. The operator had applied for approval before the local setback ordinance took effect, so the project was not subject to the distance restrictions at the time.

The village has only four houses and therefore remains outside the scope of residential setback protection under the revised decree as well. Song said the sound of the turbines resembles an airplane taking off, forcing her to keep the windows shut on windy days even in the summer. During seasons when the sun sits lower in the sky, she also experiences dizziness as the rotating blades cast shadows across her yard throughout the morning, a phenomenon known as shadow flicker.

Song and 201 other residents of Unnam-myeon applied for environmental dispute mediation and, she said, had their noise complaints recognized. She also lamented that property values had plummeted as the area became increasingly difficult to live in.

“I used to get offers of 150,000 to 200,000 won per 'pyeong' (3.3 square meters) for this land, but now it's worth less than 50,000 won, and I can't even sell it,” she said. “We need renewable energy, of course, but even if only one person lives somewhere, that person is still a human being. Shouldn’t we also consider the lives of the few residents who are affected?”

In some communities, both homes and livelihoods are under pressure as substations are built near villages already surrounded by large solar farms. On Bigeum Island in Sinan County, a 200-megawatt resident-participation solar power plant was completed in 2024. Additional privately operated solar facilities have since been built, while construction of a substation is underway nearby. Solar panels have come to within about 40 meters of homes and roughly 20 meters of salt farms and aquaculture facilities. The substation is being built about 280 meters from residential properties.

Jeong Seong-min, 73, who has cultivated rice for 50 years in Gurim-ri, Bigeum-myeon, said a salt farm that once stayed cool because it was filled with water had been converted into a solar facility, forcing residents to keep their windows closed even in summer because of the heat and inverter noise.

“The land has lost so much value that I cannot sell my house and leave,” he said.

Kim Jong-yeol, 71, who operates a whiteleg shrimp farm nearby and chairs the Bigeum Renewable Energy Emergency Response Committee, said shrimp died amid more than two months of noise and vibration from pile-driving work at the substation during the stocking season from April to May. He added that water temperatures rose by 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, forcing him to drill a new groundwater well.

A total of 517 residents filed a public interest audit request with the Board of Audit and Inspection in October last year. They alleged, among others, that public consultation had been inadequate and that the project operator had divided the development into multiple smaller projects to obtain permits while avoiding an environmental impact assessment.

Residents also say their livelihoods are being undermined as salt farms are successively converted into solar power sites, with panels now crowding the remaining salt farms. Myeong Seong-bok, 71, who has produced salt for 45 years on Bigeum Island, the birthplace of Korea’s traditional solar salt industry, said more than 150 of the island’s roughly 240 salt farms had been converted into solar power plants, leaving only about 80.

“Salt is made by evaporating seawater with sunlight and wind. But panels installed all around us block the wind, and construction dust blows in from nearby sites. The salt no longer crystallizes into large grains of the same quality as before,” he said.

Myeong added that the rapid conversion of salt farms into solar sites had weakened their ability to retain rainwater, worsening flooding during heavy downpours. In the past, he said, young people earned a living by working at salt farms in the summer and growing "seomcho," a local variety of spinach, in the winter. Now that those jobs have disappeared, many have left the island.

How to protect the lives of rural residents, particularly in sparsely populated areas, remains a challenge as Korea expands its renewable energy supply. Kim and her husband, who have already moved once to escape a wind farm, now hope to relocate again from their home in Naju. But they say they have no clear way to repay their debts by selling the house or to move the cattle that sustain their livelihood.

Looking at the solar panels under the blazing midsummer sun, Kim said, “I want to leave with my cattle.”

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.