Vietnamese battery startups eye more green financing to power renewables push

Even as Vietnam has the greatest utility-scale wind and solar capacity among its peers in Southeast Asia, the perennially high costs of storage systems and batteries are still proving to be the biggest hurdles to wider adoption, say industry players.

Their comments come in the wake of the long-awaited Power Development Plan VIII, which was given the green light last year to shift the country’s power generation mix away from coal and toward renewables such as hydrogen and ammonia.

“The lack of green finance sources and support policies from the government has undermined customers’ confidence,” Trinh Viet Dung, CTO of Vietnam-based battery developer Cenergy, tells The Business Times. “For imports of bulky battery systems in large quantities, there are high upfront costs and shipping fees.”

A renewable energy complex in Vietnam, which includes wind and solar power / Photo credit: Phu Tai / Shutterstock

Many startups are counting on home-grown battery technologies to harness Vietnam’s abundant renewable energy resources as they hold out for more robust incentives.

Under the new power strategy, the country is targeting a total capacity of at least 2,700 megawatts (MW) for pumped storage hydropower and other battery storage sources by 2030 and 30,650 MW by 2050.

Industrial energy storage

Cenergy is hoping that its efforts to develop vanadium redox flow batteries – which store energy in liquid electrolytes containing vanadium ions – will lead to the tech becoming popular in the market.

These batteries have several benefits over their counterparts such as higher energy, longer lifespan, and no problems of overcharging.

Image credit: Timmy Loen

They have been used alongside electrical grids and power plants in other countries, says Dung.

Bringing the technology closer to Vietnam by employing locally sourced materials and setting up a large-scale production facility could cut prices by up to 30%, he adds.

See also: AI race in Vietnam heats up as more tech giants join the bandwagon

This is expected to result in greater interest from industrial clients, given how electricity prices in the country are forecast to rise by 3% annually, he says.

Reducing cost of EV batteries

Thermal energy storage