By Nguyen Dang Anh Thi April 1, 2021 | 07:50 am GMT+7 vnexpress
Vietnam needs to learn the right lessons from Germany’s experience – going from protests against renewable energy to becoming one of the top five nations in clean power.
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| Nguyen Dang Anh Thi |
I choose to talk about Germany because most of the feed-in-tariff policies for Vietnam’s renewable energy have been designed using the German model and built with consultation from the Deutshe Gesellschaftür Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) or German Corporation for International Cooperation, an agency that provides services in the field of international development cooperation.
30 years ago, Germany issued the FIT policy for the first time to boost the selling of renewable electricity to the national grid. In the beginning, when the proportion of wind and solar power output made up just less than 0.1 percent of the nation’s total, there were already worries about renewable energy threatening safety and stability of the national power grid.
Back then, a group of power companies in Germany had released a joint statement creating pressure on the government, saying that renewable energy from solar, wind and hydropower plants should not exceed 4 percent of the total power output, even in the long run.
For decades, many entities in Germany had advocated thermal and nuclear power, and kept calling for delays in expanding the national power grid and delivering cautions on clean energy.
But the people of Germany had said yes big time to clean energy. Their voice, luckily, had been heard, and the government had listened to them with a long-time view, adopting consistent policies with transparency and integrity.
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