The Ministry of Industry and Trade believes that cutting down renewable energy plants is a mandatory situation to ensure electricity system security and safety.
According to the Ministry of Industry and Trade, in recent years, the development of RE resources, especially solar power in our country has achieved many positive results, strongly attracting social resources to invest in this field, contributing to effectively exploiting RE resources with many potentialities in our country.
However, the rapid development with a large capacity of RE resources concentrated in some central and southern regions has caused local overloading, overloading of transmission grids connecting regions and systems. The system has excess generation capacity compared to the load demand in some specific times and circumstances. In addition, due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, low power load growth leads to, in some situations, during the system's peak times such as holidays, New Year, weekends or off-peak periods as well as at noon daily, the electric system experience excess in generating capacity compared with the load consumed.
According to MOIT, these are dangerous situations, seriously affecting the safety and security of the power system because it can cause the power system frequency to highly increase (even causing problems to spread across the entire system of the power supply) if there are no precise dispatching orders, to-be-promptly- executed and other urgent solutions.
Although the National Power System Dispatch Center (A0) has reduced the generation of traditional energy sources down to the technical limit with minimum configuration, the power system still experiences excess capacity, so A0 is forced to further reduce renewable energy sources to ensure keeping the power system frequency within the permitted technical limits, avoid the collapse of the power system, causing serious losses to the entire activities of production, economy and people's lives nationwide.
In this regard, MOIT has provided instructions to Electricity of Vietnam (EVN) and A0. In particular, MOIT has required EVN and A0 to calculate and announce the reduction level of mobilized capacity of power plants, to direct the implementation, in accordance with the structure of the generating power source, the transmission capacity among regions/areas, the necessary level of rotation provision and fast start provision,... at the time to be regulated has decreased, complying with the principles of clarity, transparency, uniformity between types, regardless of the types of power sources that must be licensed or exempted. At the same time, MOIT issued Decision 478/QD-BCT (February 9, 2021) on shifting the peak generation time of small hydropower plants to optimize the mobilization of renewable energy sources in the power system.
The Ministry of Industry and Trade believes that the reduction in renewable energy plants is a mandatory situation in the context that the national power system is overpowered and the grid is locally overloaded in order to ensure the security and safety of the power system, and the reduction shall be calculated and performed by the EVN/A0 publicly, transparently and equally for all plants, regardless of the investors.