VietNamNet Bridge – The Electricity of Vietnam (EVN) refuses to buy electricity from a lot of Vietnamese hydropower plants, but continues buying electricity from China, even though it admitted that the areas using Chinese power have unstable voltage.

EVN, at the 2013 review conference held some days ago, for the first time, released the report about the electricity outage. While highlighting its achievements of supplying enough power for production and people’s daily life, it admitted that every household suffered the electricity cut 27 times every year.

Regarding the electricity quality, EVN said the areas using the electricity from China suffer unstable voltage, while troubles during the transmission still occur due to technical problems.

Le Van Phuoc, General Director of the HCM City Electricity, said in 2013, he had to send 11,000 letters of apology to clients.

Nevertheless, EVN still continues importing electricity from China in large quantities, despite the domestic profuse supply, thus raising a big question.

The reports showed that the electricity supply was profuse in 2012, but the electricity imports from China still exceeded the 2.5-2.8 billion kwh threshold. It planned to buy 3.6 billion kwh of electricity from China in 2013.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Trade, Chinese electricity was priced at UScent5.8 per kwh in 2011. The price level rose to UScent6.08 (VND1,300 per kwh) in 2012, the year of “electricity abundance.”

Meanwhile, domestic hydropower plants offered to sell electricity at much lower prices, just VND800-900 per kwh, and sometimes VND500-600 per kwh. Thermopower plants offered the prices at VND1,300 per kwh.

This means that Vietnam still buys electricity from China even though its production can satisfy the demand. It imports electricity at the prices higher than its production costs. And especially, the imports’ quality is worse than domestic products.

The investors of domestic hydropower plants have many times complained that EVN refuses to buy electricity from them, or only accept to pay very low prices.

The representative from a power company in the northwest said EVN once “gave itself superior airs,” refusing to buy electricity from the company-run power plant, just because of the lack of the transmission network.

The executive said that investors are always on the disadvantageous position, because EVN is the only wholesale buyer, which means that the only way investors have to follow is to sell electricity to EVN, at any prices.

Also according to the businessman, the government allowed EVN to raise the retail electricity price by 31 percent in 2009-2011, but the prices at which EVN bought from power plants stayed unchanged for a long time.

When asked to make comments about this, Dr. Le Dang Doanh, a well-known economist, said that the problem needs to be clarified by the Competition Administration Department (CAD), an independent organization, or EVN would cite a lot of reasons to explain its unreasonable behaviors.

Buying electricity from domestic plants at low prices, importing electricity at high prices and raising the retail prices, EVN has reported the profit of VND172.470 trillion in 2013, a 20 percent increase over 2012.

EVN has estimated that the electricity output to be made domestically and imported would increase by 9.9 percent.

Dat Viet