Viet Nam offered generous incentives to households and businesses to install rooftop solar last year. By the time the scheme ended, 9.3 gigawatts of extra generating capacity had been added – equivalent to six coal-fired plants.
The country, which has previously been heavily dependent on coal for electricity generation, now has more than 101,000 rooftop installations on homes, offices and factories, creating a 25-fold increase in its solar generating capacity in just one year.
A key feature of the incentive scheme was a generous feed-in tariff for solar users to sell surplus power to the national electricity grid at a price guaranteed for 20 years. Viet Nam favoured rooftop solar because it does not use scarce land or require new transmission lines.
See Viet Nam has installed 6 coal plants’ worth of solar in a year
#environment #renewableenergy #solarPV #Vietnam
While COVID-19 dampened global demand for electricity, Viet Nam delivered a 25-fold increase in its solar power capacity last year.