One count, three processes: Rethinking administrative stability in Korea's fuel-cell and renewable licensing pipeline

Abstract

Administrative amendment counts conflate recurrent filings, schedule revisions, and changes in project ownership or specification. This article develops a Frequency-Magnitude-Type framework for interpreting incomplete development records and identifying the additional information needed for monitoring. Applied to Korea's RPS-era generation-licensing pipeline, it combines action-specific filing counts, planned-deadline displacement, and filing types over common project-age windows. Rebuilding the April 2001-June 2026 ledger yields 4804 records and a dated panel of 1813 projects; principal comparisons use 1018 projects with closed three-year windows. Fuel cells and onshore wind show no statistically detectable difference in extension incidence or intensity, whereas onshore wind has 1.44 times the adjusted deadline displacement among projects with positive movement. Project-level joint analysis adds distinctions that separate technology comparisons conceal. Twenty projects record positive deadline movement without a preparation-period extension, and projects with exactly one extension exhibit different displacement distributions. Ownership-transfer tags further distinguish administrative histories within the same frequency groups. Missing deadlines are retained as missing information rather than unchanged schedules. The resulting profiles describe administrative activity, not commissioning, and direct attention to the records needed to investigate it. The historical case thus provides a recording and interpretation framework for monitoring emerging development regimes.