Vietnam Emerges an Unlikely Solar Champion as Funding for Coal Dwindles
(Bloomberg) — Nguyen Tuan was watching the sun shine down on his four-hectare cantaloupe farm in southern Vietnam when he realized it could do more than help his crops grow.
The 46-year-old installed 40 solar panels on greenhouses at his farm 55 miles outside of Ho Chi Minh City. Thanks to generous subsidies from the national utility, he not only cut his power bill but now earns about 2 million dong ($87) a month selling excess electricity to the nation’s grid.
Tuan’s farm is just one tiny part of the extraordinary 100-fold increase in solar power that’s taken place in Vietnam over the last two years. The Southeast Asian nation now ranks seventh in the world in terms of capacity, according to clean energy research group BloombergNEF, and in 2020 the only countries that installed more solar panels were the U.S. and China.