Vietnam’s Prime Minister Approves 10-year National Power Plan

Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has approved an ambitious decade-long national power development plan that will attempt to boost Vietnam’s power production to 330 billion kilowatts by 2020.

Under the proposed program, a mere three percent of the power will be imported, with Vietnamese power plants producing the remaining 97 percent, Vietnam Plus news agency reported.

The power will consist of 19.6 percent of the total being generated by hydropower, 46.8 percent by thermal power, 24 percent by natural gas power stations, 4.5 percent from renewable energy sources and the remaining 2.1 percent by nuclear power plants.

The country’s power market will be developed with various forms of investment in building power plants and the trading of electricity, but the state will retain its monopoly over the country’s transmission line network grid to ensure national energy security.

Prime Minister Nguyen also proposed that PetroVietnam and the Russian-Vietnamese joint venture Vietsovpetro expand their exploration efforts to increase oil and natural gas production in order to ensure the nation’s energy security while promoting exports and increasing government revenue.

The Prime Minister made the proposal at the 30th anniversary celebration of the agreement signed between Vietnam and the former Soviet Union establishing Vietsovpetro, an oil and gas joint-venture enterprise, which five years after its founding began producing oil from Vietnam's offshore waters.

By. Charles Kennedy, Deputy Editor OilPrice.com