The government has submitted to the National Assembly a report on policies and laws on developing energy in 2016-2021, mentioning issues related to renewable energy development.

Regarding implementation of the seventh national power development plan (PDP 7), the total electricity installation capacity was 56GW in 2019 and rose to 69.3GW in 2020 thanks to the rapid development of solar power plants, including rooftop solar power.

However, there are problems in power source structure. While investment in renewable energy was 480 percent higher than planned, thermal power was just 60 percent of the plan. 

In the north, 3GW of thermal power was behind schedule. In the south, 3.6 GW of thermal power was behind schedule, but 14GW of solar power was ahead of schedule.

Solar power is changeable and heavily dependent on weather conditions, so electricity supply remains a problem.  

“The slow implementation of thermal-power projects in both the north and the south may lead to electricity outages and cause difficulties for power regulation due to the lack of provisioned capacity, especially in the north from now to 2025,” the report said.

The electricity generation sources have had a significant shift from gray energy to clean energy; the proportion of coal-fired thermal power plants fell from 34 percent in 2016 to 32.51 percent in 2021, while renewable energy has increased from 0.3 percent in 2016 to 27 percent in 2021.

In 2019, 2020 and 2021, the electricity output from wind and solar power plants reached 5.242 billion, 10.994 billion and 29 billion kwh, respectively, thus helping reduce the use of cheap oil-run expensive electricity (down 2.17 billion kwh in 2019, 4.2 billion kwh in 2020, saving VND10.850-21 trillion).

Nevertheless, the government pointed out that when the proportion of renewable energy in the electricity system is at high level, while there is still no policy to comprehensively develop types of electricity sources, this has had certain impacts on the safe and stable operation of the national electricity system.

The re-direction to developing clean energy has also posed great challenges to the Electricity of Vietnam (EVN) in energy transition. 

Currently, EVN’s transmission network is not good enough to satisfy the flexibility when integrating renewable energy sources into the system. The retail electricity prices in Vietnam remain low when compared with other countries in the world.

Luong Bang