Vietnam installed more solar capacity in a single year than most countries have installed in their entire history — adding 9 gigawatts of rooftop solar in 2020 alone in a deployment sprint that transformed the country's electricity system faster than any national solar programme ever recorded.

 

Vietnam installed more solar capacity in a single year than most countries have installed in their entire history — adding 9 gigawatts of rooftop solar in 2020 alone in a deployment sprint that transformed the country's electricity system faster than any national solar programme ever recorded.

Vietnam's solar explosion was triggered by a feed-in tariff mechanism that created irresistible economics for rooftop solar installation on a country with excellent solar resources across its southern and central regions. The combination of 9.35 US cents per kilowatt-hour guaranteed for 20 years — significantly above Vietnamese market electricity prices — with Vietnam's 2,000 to 2,500 sunshine hours annually produced an investment rush that overwhelmed grid infrastructure, approval systems, and equipment supply chains simultaneously.

The deployment concentrated overwhelmingly in the south and central highlands — the Ninh Thuận and Bình Thuận provinces that became Southeast Asia's most dense solar development zones almost overnight. Rooftops of factories, warehouses, commercial buildings, and homes across these provinces were covered in panels within months of the tariff announcement, creating generation capacity that the regional grid had not been designed to absorb at that concentration and speed.

The grid integration challenges that resulted — curtailment, voltage instability, and transmission congestion — provided lessons that Vietnam and every other rapidly developing solar market has studied intensively. But the underlying achievement remains extraordinary: a lower-middle-income country with no prior solar industry created one of the world's largest solar fleets in under three years through a combination of policy ambition, geographic advantage, and the fundamental economics of a technology whose cost had fallen to the point where an aggressive feed-in tariff made rooftop solar a rational financial decision for millions of Vietnamese businesses and households simultaneously.

Vietnam did not plan to become a solar superpower. It became one anyway.

Source: Vietnam Electricity (EVN), Annual Report 2023

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