Despite Vietnam’s solar boom and ambitious climate targets, the fast-growing economy is leaving one of the world’s biggest coal power programs largely intact.
During the COP26 climate summit last year, the Vietnamese government promised to end the construction of new coal plants and phase out the least efficient of those already running, even as demand for fuel soars in the manufacturing powerhouse.
However, “this is not actually what Vietnam is doing at a national level,” said Nandini Das, an energy research and policy analyst at Climate Analytics.
Photo: AFP
Vietnam pledged to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, but with coal and gas still a major part of its energy mix one year later, that commitment is on shaky ground, Das said.
The state has also jailed four environmental advocates this year, including Nguy Thi Khanh, who campaigned to end the use of coal, alarming environmentalists who argue it will be even harder for Vietnam to banish dirty energy without them.
“With the climate leaders in prison, I think there’s grave doubt about the country’s ability to achieve its goals,” said Michael Sutton, director of the Goldman Environmental Foundation.
Photo: AFP
“Leaders like Khanh are instrumental in building public support” for radical change to Vietnam’s economy, Sutton said.
After China and India, Vietnam has the world’s third-largest pipeline of new coal power projects.
However, at COP27 this week, G7 countries could announce billions of dollars in funding to help steer Vietnam away from fossil fuels and the country could attract billions more in clean energy investment as part of the Just Energy Transition Partnership.
The rise of solar energy in the Southeast Asian nation has also been meteoric.
The share of electricity generated by solar saw the biggest rise in the world last year, jumping to 10 percent from 2 percent a year earlier, data from independent energy think tank Ember showed.
Last year, the country ranked in the top 10 globally for solar energy capacity.
In the Mekong Delta, farmer Doan Van Tien — whose community is poor, remote and has little access to the national grid — is one of those who benefited.
For most of his life, he relied on a costly oil generator, until the arrival of 14 solar power batteries funded by Green ID, a non-profit environmental group founded by Khanh.
“It changed my life a lot,” Doan Van Tien told reporters, gesturing to his lucrative avocado and mandarin crops.
“In the past we wanted to grow these fruit trees, but we could not [afford to power] the water pump,” he said.
Now he waters his plants for free.
Others jumped on solar thanks to generous feed-in tariffs, but its success has hit a roadblock: Infrastructure limitations mean transmission lines cannot handle supply spikes, forcing a limit on how much power operators can feed into the grid.
In other strides down a greener path, the Vietnamese Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment latest climate targets, issued in July, are “clear and much more ambitious than previous” goals, said Thang Do, a research fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University.
The ministry’s new strategy boosted the reduction target for greenhouse gases by 2030 from last year’s goal of 9 percent relative to business as usual, to 43.5 percent.
Emissions are expected to peak in 2035 before falling to net zero in 2050.
The problem is that the new policies have yet to be implemented, Das said.
“We’ll give it six months to see,” she said.
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