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| Zonrod Manuel Cervantes Baumgartner at a working session with Pacific Group, a renewable energy developer with funds from Japan |
Since 2018, I have been working with a UK solar rooftop company. The company developed several solar rooftop projects in the south of Vietnam and tried to do many more, but new regulation about grid connection from January 1, 2021, is pending.
Besides domestic investors, there are several international solar power investors and developers flock to the Vietnam market. The investors come from the world like Japan, Korea, Thailand, Germany, the UK, the USA, etc. So many solar power projects come at the same time make a burden to the national electricity grid. The grid infrastructure is not developed smart enough to receive all load. It creates troubles for the national grid as well as solar power plant investors and operators: the operators cannot sell their electricity at full capacity.
The Feed-In Tariff (FIT) policy has good points, but it needs to be reviewed. The good point is that so many investors speed up the project completion in a short time. We need to review the issues that cause damage for investors as they cannot sell the full capacity of electricity output.
My opinion is that parallel to policies to encourage investment in renewable energy, Vietnam’s Government should think about policies to utilize renewable energy such as giving incentive for battery manufacturing as well as electric vehicles consumers: when there is an increasing number of consumers of electric bike and car, the nation can absorb renewable power better, and the country will spend less budget on importing coal, diesel, and LNG
* Zonrod Manuel Cervantes Baumgartner is an Austrian citizen living in Vietnam
