Nearly 13,000 rooftop solar power projects sell electricity to EVN

The Vietnam Electricity (EVN) said that 12,765 rooftop solar power projects have registered to sell power to it with total power generation of 30.5 million kilowatt hours (kWh).

Of which, total capacity of rooftop solar power projects of customers was 216 megawatts. It is expected that by the end of this year, another 300 megawatts of rooftop solar power will be added and 2,000 megawatts by the end of 2020.

The Decision No.11/QD-TTg on mechanism to encourage the development of solar power has already expired from June 30 this year but there has not been new decision to replace it so the EVN does not have legal basis to carry out procedures to buy power of new rooftop solar power projects.

Earlier, the Government had a resolution and a decision on the implementation of some specific mechanisms and policies to support Ninh Thuan Province in socio-economic development, in which the Government gave nods to the policy to develop the province into a center of renewable energy of Vietnam. Accordingly, the Prime Minister also ordered that by the end of 2020, the connected infrastructure with a design capacity of 2,000 megawatts must be completed.

In order to make up for a shortage of power generation during off-peak hours of wind farms and solar plants in this region, a pumped storage hydroelectric plant with large capacity has been planned to build. However, the investment of the solar power plant and the power transmission infrastructure has not been implemented synchronously. Building a wind farm or a solar power plant takes just a few months whereas it takes at least 3-5 years to build a power transmission network. Therefore, after developing rapidly for two years, wind farm and solar power projects in Ninh Thuan Province have showed signs of slowdown due to overloading of transmission and connected infrastructure to the national power grids.

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