Virtual Power Plant: Digital Utility Technology in the Vietnam’s Competitive Electricity Market

The rapidly increasing penetration of distributed energy resources in recent years help the Vietnam government to closely reach the goal of 30% total power generation from clean, environmental-friendly resources in 2030.

However, this quick transition of the energy sector has brought problems affecting the power system’s stability and reliability, including power output fluctuations, surplus power generations that significantly exceed the demand, overloading at transformer stations, and severe stresses on transmission and distribution lines.

The operator of the Vietnam power system, Vietnam Electricity, is facing difficulty in properly managing thousands of newly-emerging power plants distributed unsymmetrically with the load centers across the country.

This report introduces Virtual Power Plant technology, an advanced digital approach in the energy sector that can be considered a potential solution for the Vietnam government and grid operators to solve grid operation’s current and future problems with a high share of intermittent energy resources.