Vietnam’s latest power plan opens door to foreign investment: US energy firm

Texas-based project development company Energy Capital Vietnam sees Vietnam’s newly-approved Power Development Plan VIII as a significant step toward greater energy security and the achievement of the country’s 2050 carbon neutrality goal.

“This plan opens the door to foreign investment,” David Lewis, chairman and CEO of the company, said in a company release on Tuesday from Houston, where the firm is headquartered.

“It reflects the Vietnamese government's thoughtful deliberation and analysis on how best to allocate their scarce resources towards areas and efforts that yield the highest impact,” he added.

“It supports the development of cleaner power generation while equipping the government with new legal tools to manage their licensing process better, improving accountability through market feedback, including the private sector.”

The plan, or PDP VIII, was approved last week. It will more than double Vietnam's power generation capacity to 150 gigawatts by 2030 from about 69 GW in use in 2020. Gas is poised to become a primary power source by 2030, supplemented by renewable energy, offering reduced emissions and improved environmental impact over coal.

“This puts Vietnam's declared goals for net-zero carbon by 2050 within reach,” said the American energy firm, shortly known as ECV.

ECV, together with its partners, is developing integrated multi-phase LNG power projects in the country.

The company announced in late 2021 that B.Grimm Power of Thailand and global firm Siemens Energy had joined its consortium to develop an LNG-to-power 3,600 megawatts project in the Mui Ke Ga area in Binh Thuan province, less than 200 kilometers northeast of Ho Chi Minh City. The project had an estimated total cost of $1.75 billion.

Germany’s Deutsche Bank was mandated as the capital structuring bank, while Maius GmbH also of Germany was engaged in project risk mitigation and financing solutions, ECV said at that time.

On May 9, American industrial giant Honeywell signed a deal to become the equipment provider for a large-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) project in Khanh Hoa province, also in the south-central province.

The development will be a BESS of 15 MW output and 7.5 megawatt-hour capacity, to be installed at the site of the 50 megawatt-peak Khanh Hoa solar power plant. The project is being developed by AMI AC Renewables, a joint venture between the Philippines-headquartered power plant developer AC Energy and Vietnam’s AMI Renewables, a renewable energy development platform.

The joint venture has received two grants totaling $5.96 million from the U.S. Mission in Vietnam for the BESS project.