This week I was part of the facilitation team at Invent X which is our flagship staff global training event for 500 consultants. I set them the challenge of how do you transition an economy like Vietnam.
They were told that they have been appointed as the new Energy Minister for Vietnam. They were given a 10-minute briefing, and background materials. Then they worked in groups for 25 minutes, before appearing ‘live’ on Vietnam TV for a one-minute interview. Most of the participants weren’t energy consultants.
Here's a summary of what they said in their interviews:
1. Importance of public engagement – each of the 8 groups that participated identified this as a key part of their plan. They identified new jobs, reduced pollution, and making this a just transition as priorities for their new role.
2. Developing a deep industrial strategy that brings prosperity, but with clean energy, that secured Vietnam’s place as a regional hub with great opportunities to be a player in Energy Transition technologies.
3. Developing a coal exit strategy was seen as critical – possibly using gas as a transition fuel, along with increased investment in renewables – particularly wind and solar, but also hydro and biomass were seen as opportunities for Vietnam.
4. Taxation and incentives – a fiscal policy that penalises polluters and rewards clean energy use. This included targets and monitoring – and the need for reliable and trustworthy data to direct the transition.
5. Grid investment was a key topic for most of the groups, this included a focus on developing local micro grids and home generation to remove the overall load on the grid. Also increased interconnection to their neighbours China, Thailand, Laos, & Cambodia.
6. Transportation was a priority, particularly with Vietnam’s 50 million motorbikes – there were good examples of how electrification could help, along with increased investment in public transport. Although transport is less than 15% of CO2 emissions.
7. Some of the groups had very high financial demands on the international community, wanting many billions of inward investment in the transition, but they recognised that the perception of corruption was a potential barrier to this investment.
8. With 46% of the population at threat from climate change the groups were aligned on the need for climate adaptations such as flood prevention, and more careful siting of assets away from flood areas.
9. Innovation for new energy solutions. Hydrogen and CCUS were two of the technologies identified.
Across all groups there was acceptance that this would take some time, and that there wasn’t enough already underway and in the current plans to make Vietnam’s commitment to Net Zero by 2050 a realistic proposition.
