- ietnam’s energy establishment attempted last year to flout top-level instructions to undo the nation’s growing dependence on coal and other fossil fuels.
- However, after more than a decade of failures by bureaucrats and managers to deliver clean energy and clean air, there is broad sentiment for maximal exploitation of Vietnam’s plentiful endowment of wind and sunshine.
- At COP26, the prime minister left no doubt which way the nation is headed: Vietnam, he pledged, will be carbon neutral by 2050.
- But the recent developments have also seen a leading advocate for the clean energy transition jailed after publishing a letter warning of the risks of clinging to coal.
Vietnam is a nation of nearly 100 million people, a long, skinny, tropical country stretched along the western side of the South China Sea. For a quarter-century, its economy has been growing at an average annual rate of more than 6%. Investment dollars pour in because multinational corporations have found that Vietnamese workers are very good at making products that the rest of the world wants to consume.
Since 2010, by World Bank criteria, Vietnam has been a “middle-income country.” Its leaders aim higher. Their goal for Vietnam, set at a Communist Party congress in January 2021, is to be a “high-income developed country” by 2045, with per capita income of $18,000 in current U.S. dollars.
That’s not likely unless Vietnam gets free of its dependence on coal to provide its electricity. The nation’s power grid is overtaxed and its energy sector is highly dependent on coal-fired power. In 2021, Vietnam produced 141 gigawatt-hours of electricity from coal. Worldwide, only eight other nations burned more coal.
Mongabay reported 18 months ago that Vietnam’s governing class had reached a consensus that reliance on coal is the principal brake on Vietnam’s quest for a permanently high quality of life. In parallel, civil society groups like Green Innovation and Development Centre (GreenID) had persuaded a large swath of ordinary citizens that only big changes in the energy policy could reverse palpably worsening environmental quality.
And yet, as recently as the second half of last year, power planners were still fighting a sharp break with the coal-centric policies of the recent past. The officials who populate the senior ranks of the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT) and three big state enterprises — Vinacomin (coal), EVN (electricity) and PetroVietnam (oil and gas) — are protégés of people who trained in the USSR in the days of central planning. Thus it’s no surprise that many in the nation’s energy establishment are skeptical of new approaches and unfamiliar technologies.
In October 2021, MOIT presented to the prime minister’s office a redrafted power development plan that was sharply at odds with top-level guidance, the Politburo’s Resolution #55, issued 18 months earlier.
Typically, it has been the energy establishment that has decided what needs be done to meet projected demand. In the first decades after Vietnam was unified, there was heavy emphasis on hydropower, coal and, later, also on burning natural gas from offshore fields. In time, these were fully exploited. Attention turned for a while to nuclear power. PDP-7 (2010) envisioned the construction of up to a dozen nuclear power plants.
The energy establishment’s nuclear dreams didn’t last; they were shelved a few years later as prohibitively expensive, too long in gestation and, after Japan’s Fukushima disaster, highly unpopular with the Vietnamese public. Planners concluded that to meet surging demand, Vietnam had to double down on coal-fired power plants, many more of them, and as quickly as investors and financing could be arranged. A 2016 revision of PDP-7 forecast that coal’s contribution to national energy supply would rise from 35% in 2015 to 55% in 2025.
Vietnam’s bet on coal collided head-on with rising concern over the impacts of climate change. One by one, international development banks swore off financing coal plants; by 2020, only a few South Korean, Japanese and Chinese lenders would consider backing new ventures in Vietnam or anywhere else. Although in 2018, Vietnam had 32 gigawatts of further coal-fired generating capacity under construction or planned, most projects were falling well behind schedule and others would soon be cancelled.
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