Việt Nam Electricity (EVN) has received proposals from seven wind farm investors in Laos that want to sell electricity to Việt Nam, with a total capacity of nearly 4,150 MW, the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) has said.

Lao investors will offer to sell over 682 MW of wind power before 2025 while the remaining amount will be delivered after this period, the MoIT said in its recent report.

Wind power imported from Laos will be brought to Việt Nam via transmission lines in the central province of Quảng Trị. That means the amount of electricity purchased will depend largely on the infrastructure in this area.

However, the wind power that Lao investors want to sell to Việt Nam will exceed the capacity of the provincial power grid as most 200 kV and 110 kV lines in the locality regularly operate between 80 per cent and 100 per cent of the designed capacity. Particularly in the dry season from May to July, the province can only receive a maximum of 300 MW of electricity while the remaining months of the year can receive a lower level.

According to EVN, with the additional grid infrastructure and connection lines and the operation of the 500 kV Hướng Hóa substation, the province could only receive 2,500 MW of electricity from Laos. But this figure would be 1,650 MW lower than the total capacity that Lao investors wanted to sell to Việt Nam.

Previously last year, EVN submitted a document to the MoIT regarding the proposal to import wind power from Laos to Quảng Trị Province, vietnamplus.vn reported.

EVN urged the ministry to review and submit to the Prime Minister the proposal to import electricity from the Trường Sơn Wind Power Plant, including additional planning for transmission lines. The purchase price for electricity from this project would be 6.95 US cents/kWh, equivalent to about VNĐ1,700/kWh.

The ministry said it had received a document requesting feedback from ministries and localities on the proposal to purchase wind power from the plant, with a capacity of 250MW, from Bolikhamsai Province in Laos to Việt Nam, as proposed by EVN.

According to the ministry, the plant would be slated for completion in the fourth quarter of 2025.

To meet the project completion schedule in 2025, the project's investor, the Việt Nam Laos Energy Investment and Development Corporation, sent a document to EVN proposing to sell electricity from this project to Việt Nam. The investor suggested investing in the entire grid connection project to connect the plant to Việt Nam's power system using the project's funds.

In an earlier development, in a report to the ministry, EVN stated that the governments of Laos and Việt Nam had agreed to import 1,000MW of electricity from Laos to Việt Nam by 2020.

The imported electricity volume was expected to be around 3,000MW by 2025 and about 5,000MW by 2030. As of October 2023, the Prime Minister had approved the proposal to import electricity from various sources in Laos with a total capacity of 2,689MW.

EVN had signed 19 power purchase agreements (PPA) to buy electricity from 26 Laotian power plants with a total capacity of 2,240MW. Among them, seven projects were commercially operational with a total capacity of 806MW, and it was expected that an additional 1,171MW could be put into operation by 2025, according to the ministry. — VNS