On June 29th, the seminar -“Ho Chi Minh City’s Low Carbon City program: From concept to action” was organized by the World Bank Group and the Department of Natural Resources and Environment at the Sheraton, Ho Chi Minh city
Starting in 2022, Ho Chi Minh City cooperates with World Bank to establish a research group on carbon emissions.
This workshop is the second in a series of seminars organized to gather representatives from the public and private sectors to raise awareness and gather opinions on the development of a Low Carbon City program for Ho Chi Minh City, with the most crucial part of that program being the development of the carbon market. The main topics discussed during the seminar were the current state of the carbon market and the opportunity that the city had to utilize this market. Experts from the World Bank reviewed the results of the initial steps and presented the upcoming actions needed to move the program forward.
Thomas Jakobsen, Managing Director at Indochina Energy Partners (IEP)was invited to join to provide the perspective of the private sector, who would be among the beneficiaries of the carbon market.
During the discussion, Thomas gave his opinion as an independent power producer (IPP) who does rooftop solar. In a perfect world, off-takers could buy all the power produced by the solar systems from IEP, but that is a very unlikely scenario, and that means possible financial problems. In the past, he suggested a low Feed-in Tariff of 4-5 cents per kilowatt-hour to serve both as a deterrent to those exploitative solar projects (that aim to exploit the system and sell all their generated power to the grid) and a means of de-risking for projects that are planned around self-consumption.
With the implementation of the carbon credit system, IEP expects to be able to trade in a renewable energy source for carbon credit points with EVN. This could be a long-term, sustainable replacement for FiT. The last 2 FiT schemes were both short-lived and led to intensive investment in exploitative roof-top solar projects.
Indochina Energy Partners would like to thank Mr. Vo Van Hoan and Ho Chi Minh People’s Committee along with the World Bank for their active leadership in pushing the next steps in decarbonizing the economy of the city and funding the fight against pollution, making this a world class city.
