CURRENT STATUS OF INVESTMENT IN WIND POWER PROJECTS IN VIETNAM

According to an assessment from the Ministry of Industry and Trade, Vietnam is currently one of the 10 countries with the largest demand for electricity growth in the world. To meet the electricity demand from now to 2030, Vietnam will still develop traditional energy sources such as coal, gas, oil, and hydroelectricity in parallel with the development of renewable energy sources such as solar power, wind electricity,…

Over the past time, the Government has issued mechanisms and policies to prioritize and encourage renewable energy sources; especially towards using wind power, solar power, biomass power to replace fossil energy sources in the future. These mechanisms help the development of renewable energy in Vietnam have a lot of prosperity, however, the development is still slow.

Incentives on investment in plant construction and electricity selling price for Electricity of Vietnam have attracted the attention of both domestic and foreign investors. Therefore, although only starting to build wind power plants in 2012 with Tuy Phong Wind Power Plant (now known as Binh Thanh Wind Power), as of March 2020, there are 12 wind power projects developed with total capacity of 470 MW (typically projects such as: Tuy Phong - Binh Thuan, Phu Lac, Mui Dinh, Bac Lieu, Dam Nai...); 31 projects have signed power purchase agreements with a total capacity of 1,662 MW with a plan to come into operation in 2020 and 2021; 78 projects have been added to the Power Development Plan with a capacity of about 4,880 MW. In addition, the Ministry of Industry and Trade has also received proposals to supplement the electricity planning of localities for nearly 250 wind power projects, with a scale of up to 45,000 MW. Among these, there are 3 offshore wind power projects with a scale of 4,900 MW.

However, after more than 10 years of the Government's development priority policy, only 12 projects have been put into operation in the whole country, reaching just over 50% of the approved plan (800 MW in 2020) and only 7 % of total solar power capacity. Due to the recent development of renewable energy, there have been some shortcomings and limitations such as:

- The transmission network is not adequate, not large enough for transmission, not synchronized between the development of the source and the power grid. Although renewable energy sources are always prioritized for maximum generation, among more than 4,500MW of wind power and solar power that were put into operation before June 30, 2019, 440MW are currently having to reduce generating capacity.

- Due to the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic, production and supply of key equipment and components of wind power projects were in short supply and stalled worldwide. Vietnam is also in this situation, the project construction implementation has difficulty in importing equipment, the entry and exit of foreign technical experts is interrupted, there is a lack of foreign experts for technical coordination. , leading to many projects not being able to keep up with the schedule according to the fixed electricity price (FIT) mechanism.

- Construction of wind power is much more complicated than solar power, because in addition to handling the foundation firmly enough for the wind turbine to operate stably for more than 20 years, a specialized crane is also required to install super equipment. field, super weight, to a height of sometimes over 100m.

- Land demand for onshore wind power projects needs about 28,000 hectares, the problem of loss of arable land and people's livelihood is a deep concern of the Government and localities.

- There are still problems and inadequacies in investment processes and procedures such as: The power purchase agreement has not been standardized, the project approval procedure is cumbersome, through many stages, many steps, and is not transparent.

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