VietNamNet Bridge – Experts believe that investors won’t make profits with their small hydropower plant projects and they understand this well. However, they still ask for the permission to implement the projects, for other purposes.

Despite the strong opposition from the public, the criticism from the relevant agencies and organizations and the warnings about the loss, more investors have asked for the licenses to develop hydropower plants.

The common characteristic of the projects is that they are expected to use parts of the national parks.

Both the Ea K’Tour in Dak Lak and Drang Phok in Gia Lai hydropower projects have the projected small capacity of 5 MW and 26 MW, respectively.

Tran Viet Ngai, Chair of the Vietnam Energy Association, said he was surprised when the investors still want to develop hydropower plants at this moment, while a lot of other investors have run away from the projects.

Ngai affirmed that private investors won’t make profit with the small projects from now on. The big projects with the capacity of over 30 MW which can bring profits have been developed by the Electricity of Vietnam (EVN) already.

If investors still insist on developing hydropower projects, they will be certain of losses, or their electricity will be unsalable.

"The investors might have some other purposes when trying to develop small scale hydropower plant projects,” Ngai said

Under the latest master program on the power plant development, all the hydropower plants would be finished by 2017, while only the big and effective projects can be run.

In reality, a lot of small scaled hydropower plant projects which do not aim to generate electricity have been licensed. A high number of small hydropower plants have been licensed, but the economic efficiency has not been high.

A report showed that while the majority of the hydropower plants have the small capacity of less than 10 MW, they cover large areas of forest land--about 14 hectares for one MW of electricity generated.

Especially, the investment rate is high at VND16-20 billion for one MW of electricity. Since the plants are located in remote and mountainous areas, Vietnam has to pay high for the transmission costs.

Meanwhile, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Vietnam has lost 20,000 hectares of the natural forests to implement 160 hydropower plant projects, which means that it has to sacrifice 125 hectares to implement one project.

In fact, the actual figure could be even higher, because local authorities have to allocate land for people to resettle down.

Ngai believes that the main purpose of a lot of investors is to exploit forest products, and once they finish exploiting wood, they would not need the projects any more.

Professor Dr. Nguyen Hoang Tri, a member of the Vietnam UNESCO also thinks that there are some people who benefit from the hydropower plant projects. This is the only explanation to the question why such small and ineffective projects still have been developed.

Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Lung, an expert on the forest protection, under the mask of developing hydropower plants, the investors can exploit wood legally, though no one admits this.

In principle, the investors have to afforest to compensate the plants they chop down. However, no one has done this.

Kim Chi