January 10, 2020, by Vietnam Weekly
Power generation has been in the news a lot recently, and for good reason: Vietnam is expected to face major electricity shortages starting next year, and the government is going all-out to prevent that from happening.
Last month, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc ordered Vietnam Electricity (EVN), the state-run power monopoly, to avoid power cuts under any circumstance. Demand from a booming economy is outstripping supply, particularly as a number of large coal-fired power plant projects face delays due to financing struggles. Phuc called for several of these plants to be completed.
Meanwhile, on December 30, 12 environment- and health-focused networks and NGOs released a statement calling on the prime minister to halt work on 14 coal-fired plants in eight provinces.
For Saigoneer, I looked at the explosion of renewable energy - particularly solar - which took place in Vietnam last year. This turned the country into a renewable leader within Southeast Asia, but new policies need to be implemented for this to continue. In fact, so much solar was built last year that it created problems for the electrical grid, though it's not as simple as the issue explained in this piece - the trouble is that most of the solar was built in just two provinces.
Hydropower is also a major source of electricity in Vietnam, but that resource has largely reached its capacity, and reservoirs in central provinces are currently extremely low due to a lack of rainfall. This has forced EVN to look beyond Vietnam's borders, and earlier this week the utility announced deals that will allow it to import huge amounts of hydropower-generated electricity from Laos starting next year. (Yes, there is irony in Vietnam relying on power sources created by dams that are helping to bring the Mekong Delta to a crisis point.)
I would expect more developments in this sector as we move through 2020: the economy shows no sign of slowing down, power demand from industry will continue to rise, and worsening air pollution is bringing the downsides of coal-generated power into depressingly clear focus.
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