After five years, the Smart Grids for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (SGREEE) project will conclude at the end of June 2022. The project – jointly run by the Electricity Regulatory Authority of Viet Nam (ERAV) and GIZ – held its closing ceremony in Hanoi on 23th June.

Participants at the event were from the ERAV and the Office of Steering committee for Power Development Planning of the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT), the Ministry of Finance, the Viet Nam Electricity, regional Power Corporations, the National Load Dispatch Center, provincial power companies, consulting service providers and universities.

The SGREEE project was commissioned in 2017 by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development within the German Climate Technology Initiative (DKTI). When the project started, Viet Nam had yet to have extensive discussions on energy transition nor committed to net zero.

With Viet Nam’s strong commitment to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), the country needs to build a sustainable energy transition, in which the transformation of energy infrastructure including smart grid plays an important role. To enable the progress, the country needs to update its strategy on developing Smart Grid in Viet Nam (in short: Smart Grid Roadmap) after 10 years of implementation.

Therefore, the SGREEE project has proposed amendments to the legal framework on relevant issues, while also developing the capacity of stakeholders to use new technologies and ensure investment funds are used effectively. SGREEE has focused on the integration of renewable energy into the power grid, an important first step towards transition away from fossil fuels.

Mr. Markus Bissel, SGREEE’s Project Director, said ‘Viet Nam faces a multitude of challenges as it moves in the field of tension between energy-intensive industrial growth goals, socio-economic goals, and CO2 reduction goals. In the emerging era of Viet Nam’s energy transition, various core topics are thematically in the foreground.’

‘SGREEE has succeeded in bringing the personnel closer to international standards in the field of a modern power grid regulator. The project also supported ERAV in reviewing the regulations for Smart Grids. Among them, the contributions to the revision of the Smart Grid Roadmap – the central document for the development of Smart Grids in Viet Nam – were forward-looking,’ he added.

A number of key achievements has resulted from SGREEE’s three action areas – Legal and regulatory framework, Capacity development and Technology cooperation.

For “Legal and regulatory framework”, the project has provided ERAV and other policymakers with information as well as strategic advice for improving Viet Nam’s regulatory framework for a Smart Grid, which included proposals for revising the Smart Grid Roadmap, the Electricity Law and Demand Response Programme. All of this serves the purposes of energy transition and meeting Viet Nam’s increasing demand for electricity.

In “Capacity development”, SGREEE established the Smart Grid Viet Nam Knowledge Hub (http://smart-grid.vn/) and a Smart Grid knowledge network in the form of a group on Facebook with almost 1,000 members (https://www.facebook.com/groups/smartgridvn). The project also organised the “Smart Grid Viet Nam Week” in 2019, which is the country’s first national event on Smart Grid development.

In “Technology Cooperation”, power sector experts learned and exchanged knowledge and experiences about available state-of-the-art technology solutions for an intelligent power supply system on an international level and insights into the benefits that these measures can have for the Vietnamese power sector. Among them were the introduction of Virtual Power Plant technology, which will monitor, forecast and remotely control decentralised sources of renewable energy.

On the same day with the closing ceremony, SGREEE also organised the final technical workshop “Implementation design for Demand Response Program for Viet Nam”, which suggests price-based and direct financial incentive-based mechanism as well as Aggregator models to accelerate implementation of Viet Nam’s Demand Response program which contributes to the peak load reduction of the national/regional power system or in overloaded/congested grid areas.

To read key activities and achievements of the SGREEE project, please click the link: https://gizenergy.org.vn/…/magazine-smart-grid-renewable…