Vietnam has recently seen rapid growth in the renewable energy sector, and the country has adopted several policies for the development of renewable energy technologies. The solar photovoltaics market has been boosted by a feed-in tariff rate for solar farms and a net-metering scheme for distributed photovoltaics. As of 2019, Vietnam had 5.6 GW of solar PV capacity, anticipated to grow to 20 GW by 2030, and 0.9 GW of onshore wind capacity, with expected capacity of 11.7 GW by 2030.
Within Vietnam’s feed-in tariff incentive scheme for solar promotion, which ended in June 2019, USAID Clean Power Asia provided analysis supporting rooftop solar promotion and In July 2019, the Ministry of Industry and Trade launched the Rooftop Solar Promotion Program for the 2019-2025 period. USAID Clean Power Asia and USAID’s Vietnam Low Emission Energy Program assisted the government in evaluating policy changes needed to increase investment in rooftop PV. The revised program aims to have 100,000 rooftop solar systems in place by the end of 2025, and by April 2020, a total of 27,845 rooftop solar systems with a capacity of 573.24 MWp had been installed in Vietnam.
USAID Clean Power Asia assisted B.Grimm Power and its Vietnamese partner to structure a financing arrangement to unlock loans for their 257 MW solar project worth USD$283 million, among the largest solar projects in Southeast Asia. While regulations for solar power in Vietnam are attractive from a pricing perspective, other provisions limit the ability to obtain loans for project implementation, so USAID’s support was instrumental in identifying a suitable financing structure to overcome this barrier to obtaining debt financing.