Vietnam’s Mekong Delta will be getting its first wind farm by next year with GE Energy winning a contract to supply 10 wind turbines to local developer Cong Ly Company.
The two firms announced the contract last Thursday for global technology firm GE to build and operate turbines for phase one of the Bac Lieu Wind Farm. The project, located on the southern edge of the Mekong Delta about 100 kilometres south of Can Tho, will have a generation capacity of 16 megawatts (MW) once it is completed early next year.
This will be the first large-scale industrial energy project in the Bac Lieu province, said Cong Ly Company chairman To Hoai Dan.
Country executive for GE Energy in Vietnam, Nguyen Xuan Thang, called the project a significant milestone for the Bac Lieu province and said that the project would help to improve social and economic conditions there by creating jobs and developing technical skills.
The Bac Lieu province is a coastal region whose main economic activities are growing rice, seafood processing and clothing manufacturing.
Phase one of the Bac Lieu project will use GE turbines that generate 1.6MW of power each using 82.5 metre rotors.
Cong Ly Company is planning a second phase, which will potentially add another 120MW, to be completed in the same district by the end of next year.
Mr Nguyen told Eco-Business in an e-mail interview that the wind energy project would provide Vietnam with a more diversified energy portfolio. “It also provides an alternative to Vietnam’s reliance on hydropower as a cleaner source of energy and aligns with the government vision to generate five per cent of the country’s electricity from renewable sources by 2020,” he added.
Hydropower was the only renewable energy included in the International Energy Agency’s 2008 list of electricity production methods for Vietnam. Hydropower plants produced almost 36 per cent of Vietnam’s electricity for the year. At 42 per cent, gas produced the most electricity, and coal came in third at 20 per cent.
Last year, water levels at Vietnam’s drought-stricken hydropower dams dropped to critical levels, causing plants such as the Pleikrong power plant in the Kon Tum Province to reduce operating hours to one or two hours per day, and even cease production on several days.
Negative perceptions of the social and environmental impacts have also affected the outlook for hydropower in recent years as high profile projects such as Laos’ Xayaburi dam and Vietnam’s Yali Falls dam have drawn criticism for disregarding potential damage to downstream environments and communities.
Vietnam’s installed capacity from all sources in 2009 was 17,652MW. A World Bank study from the same year found that Vietnam has a combined offshore and onshore wind power potential of around 513,260MW.
GE, which in 2009 built a factory in the Vietnamese city of Hai Phong for making wind turbine components, plans to help Vietnam get closer to reaching that potential.
“This is the first wind project that GE has in the Southeast Asia region and we certainly want our business to grow in tandem with the growing investment and focus on renewable energy in this region,” said Mr Nguyen, adding that GE already supplies about 18 per cent of Vietnam’s power generation capacity through other energy sources.
For Cong Ly Company’s Mr To, the project signifies the beginning of increased growth in the region. “We hope this first large-scale wind farm project will help to attract more investments into the Bac Lieu province in the future,” he said.
