On the 13th and 14th of July, The Future Energy Show was hosted by Terrapin at the Adora Center Ho Chi Minh City after 3 years. Thomas Jakobsen, managing director of Indochina Energy Partners joined the ‘Rooftop is the limit’ panel, where driving factors for rooftop solar growth in Vietnam were discussed.
EVN is in many ways a victim of its own success. In Vietnam power is always available and at a low price. This is a very good situation when comparing regionally.
The 10GW of “roof tops” include approximately significant “Agri solar” which is ground mounted solar achieving the roof top rate and not complying to decision 13 and significant Roof Top Solar projects which is 80-100% export based with limited self-consumption. This means there is quite little true roof top solar that is mainly self-consumption with minimal/no sales to the grid.
It is therefore completely natural that there is a “time-out” where EVN evaluates the situation.
It has therefore since autumn 2020 been the opinion of Indochina Energy Partners that the best way forward was to suggest the legal framework for roof-top solar that has the lowest impact on EVN, namely a 100% self-consumption model, possibly with a very low Feed in Tariff (FiT) capped at 10-20% of all production.
So, the growth will all be around the sensible projects that should have been allowed initially and not have the focus on FiT.