Apple supplier Foxconn among firms asked to cut power use in Vietnam
reuters.com
reuters.com
Thats one way to achieve "net zero"...
With how windy the whole Netherlands is I'd have expected it to be doing much better in wind power generation, seems like the oil lobby from Shell is eating the whole country's energy future...
Edit: quite unexpected to get downvotes, is it the mention of Shell causing some issue? Because I believe it's a big reason for a massive off-shore wind potential to go untapped until around 2020.
Being an entirely flat country is very bad for hydropower.
This makes deploying solar panels highly cost effective but it basically makes daytime summer power so ubiquitous that they're having a hard time using it up. And on a global scale it's a waste of resources because Holland doesn't get an awful lot of sun.
Meanwhile in Spain almost nobody has panels because they only get the momentary value which is not worth it during sunny tints unless you use it to run your own AC.
The way bigger issue now is the fact that To Lam is now president (#2 in Vietnam) and being positioned for the top seat in 2026. Oh and he'll continue to be Minister of Public Security as well.
It's the equivalent of making the Head of the KGB the next head of the USSR.
To Lam and the faction that backed him are much more ambivalent of market economics than the faction that lost the game of thrones going on the past few years, and he is EXTREMELY authoritarian in how he handles governance (he was the butcher of Gia Lai).
This is basically the same game of thrones we saw in China in 2011-14 happening in VN.
Already my SO's friends who run medical practices and clinics in Saigon are getting hit this past month by "anti-corruption" investigations that are basically a blatant attempt at extracting bribes - which was always an issue but never as blatant as the last few weeks.
Lots of medical groups do bad stuff in VN, but the laws were also made to maximize bribe taking on the regulators end - for example, Nitrous Oxide is an illegal anesthesia, despite being openly available and abused in the party scene in VN, along with the fact that regulations around clinic sizes were purposely made so it's essentially impossible for any clinic to be following building code, and lots of doctors have been laid off the last few weeks because government docs get paid horribly ($200-300/mo) so everyone moonlights. And now most clinics are cutting staff or shutting down.
Oh and Medical Education is no longer free - they're now charging $6k/yr for medical education in a country where your average household income might be half that and unlike the PH or Indonesia (countries with a similar GDP per Capita and HDI) there isn't a strong professionalized local lending and mortgage scene.
No worries! That's a good way to operate on the internet! Best to default assume it's all BS. And in all honesty, I have gotten lazy with citations recently.
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For the medical anti-corruption crackdown, I don't have a source I can share other than hectic Zalo group chats of our friends asking us for last minute cash infusions as well as my SO's network back in VN, as well as her cousin's tuition hike at UMP after they changed the entire curriculum in the last 2 years (Edit: was lazy, I found it. 2024 [https://tuoitre.vn/truong-dai-hoc-y-duoc-tp-hcm-tang-hoc-phi...] versus 2022 [https://amp.laodong.vn/tuyen-sinh/hoc-phi-cac-truong-y-duoc-...] - they 6Xed tuition in just 2 years from $500/sem to $3k/sem)
For the To Lam and larger "anti-corruption" saga, it's been a rolling saga since the Viet A scandal. I'd use these though:
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/vietnam-lawmakers...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/vietnam-parliamen...
[2] - https://thediplomat.com/2024/05/with-latest-resignations-vie...
[3] - https://thediplomat.com/2023/03/vietnams-political-shake-up/
[4] - https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Vietnam-is-losing-appeal-as-...
[5] - https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Vietnam-s-GDP-growth-slowed-...
[6] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-22/-do-nothi...
[7] - https://thediplomat.com/2022/06/vietnams-communist-party-dum...
But I do think GDP growth will slow to the 4-6% range over the next decade because even though VN's GDP per Capita is relatively high, the VN market is way less developed than Indonesia or Phillipines, let alone Thailand, Malaysia, or China and unlike China in the 1990s it doesn't have a MASSIVE consumer population to justify the headaches (eg. the article above).
The average VNese definitely has a lower standard of living than your average Indonesian or Pinoy based on my travels in all 3, and consumer spending is morose (it's comparable to Cambodia and Laos).
That said, if To Lam and MPS successfully control the Vietnamese Politburo, it's game over. There's no reason to invest in VN over PH, IND, TH, or IN if the technocrats we had relationships with are all in jail or trying to buy property in OC and leave.
There was story last year in the UK, where the power usage of data centres in west London were blamed for a lack of housing development. This turned out not to be true and an exercise in blame-shifting [1]
[1] https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252523510/Datacentre-sec...
* in large parts of the country, there is just sun at least half of the year, yet solar power is basically non-existent, basically all (edit: not all, but most) is coal. if renewables are so great, why are there no solar panels anywhere, in a country that is all sun? I saw some wind turbines in the central mountains at least
* a lot of electricity is used on ACs, every house has at least one AC - how did people live before ACs were invented? can't imagine
Land procurement is annoying in VN, and most of the large scale infra is basically built by private players because local government is not the most capable.
Also, it is mostly mountainous
> how did people live before ACs were invented
Start the day very early, take a siesta, and living in traditional houses to minimize the sun while also getting plenty of airflow.
Edit:
Listen to leduyquang753. His answer is much deeper and accurate than my broad strokes one.
There's the part where people were more resistant to heat one way or another (either they were more used to it, or they made adjustments and had better coping mechanisms, or both).
The other part is the gradual change in climate and environement where it might have gotten way worse than before. For instance having houses with bigger windows/worse insulation, more pollution pushing people to close their windows, more asphalt/less heat dissipation, more humidity and sheer temperatures raising.
You won’t see people walking around outside during the hottest hours (9am to 5pm). People are in the shade, avoid physical activity.
There are some manual laborers working outside at those hours, but they are covered from head to toe to protect against the sun and take frequent breaks in the shade.
But heat tolerance is real. Many people live without AC, and even those with it often won’t use it except for the hottest few days of the year.
It will be 35C with 50% humidity (41C heat index) and they aren’t sweating.
> Many people live without AC, and even those with it often won’t use it except for the hottest few days of the year.
That can still make a lot of difference.
Western prices for kWh are sever times higher than in Vietnam. What might be a great deal in USA or Germany, might not be so great in other countries.
You can tell from the fact that Florida was almost empty, just half a million people in 1900. It didn't grow too much until about 1950 (2.8 million), when the population started to soar - through immigration, not by having a wild birthrate. Nowadays, 23 million, and more are coming every day, even though the place is notorious for its hurricanes.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/states/florida/po...
Ubiquitous AC that made southern states more attractive is one of the reasons why the Northeast no longer dominates the US economy and politics.
And worldwide, places like Singapore, Bangalore and Tel Aviv could hardly dream of becoming hi-tech metropolises before AC.
They lived simpler lives with less mental work that required concentration.
Lee Kuan Yew, the man credited with transforming Singapore into a modern, developed country, is quoted as saying:
"Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency."
> Viet Nam leads Southeast Asia in share of low-carbon generation (42%), primarily from hydro (29%). From 2015 to 2023, solar and wind grew tenfold to 13% of electricity generation, on a par with the global average and exceeding peers like Thailand (4.7%) and the Philippines (3.2%).
Stats from Ember climate report.
VN is "Communist" the same way the DPRK is "Democratic".
In action it's a Wild West capitalist authoritarian state.
They've been a market economy since 1986.
> the government isn’t exactly know for its dynamic approach in using market forces for resource allocation so a buyer can pay more to secure power instead of another customer
This isn't it. The issue is the capacity doesn't exist. Vietnam was in a state of war from 1939-1990, and infrastructure is creaky.
Most of the infra that exists now was built in the last 15 years by private players, and private players are hesitant to put money in right now due to the game of thrones and VN's China influenced Zero-Covid policy a couple years ago.
No, it's different. Vietnam is still a one party communist country and the utilities are publicly run - with all the bureaucracy and incompetence that goes along with it. The state owned enterprises haven't changed that much since Doi Moi.
> This isn't it. The issue is the capacity doesn't exist.
There is clearly capacity for one company to lower demand by more and "sell" it to another which is what the message I replied to was alluding to.
My comment was that while possible, the public utility likely had a blank stare on their face when asked about it.
Yea, but they are not as singular in control of the economy as they were before Doi Moi.
Just having state owned companies does not make a country communist.
Utilties are state owned (EVN) but the capacity infra is private owned in part or majority.
Also, foreign private sector players like Mitsubishi, Chubu Electric, and POSCO Electric are significant players in the VNese sector by building capacity and significant or majority ownership stakes in power projects, especially because Vietnam has much more stringent FTAs with SK and Japan compared to China.
If Vietnam attempts Chinese style forced JVs, foreign players will return to investing in Thailand, Indonesia, Phillipines, or India.
> There is clearly capacity for one company to lower demand by more and another less which is what the message I was replying to
This by definition is a lack of capacity, because enough capacity was not built, and that was because a lot of us foreigners became much more cautious of financing projects in Vietnam by 2021-23.
> The state owned enterprises haven't changed that much since Doi Moi
I strongly disagree. Significant stakes in the SoEs are now owned by foreign (mostly Japanese, Korean, and HK) companies after the FTAs in the mid-2010s, and at least on the banking and finance side it has professionalized - not to the level in Indonesia or Phillipines, let alone China, but it's getting there.
> Yea, but they are not as singular in control of the economy as they were before Doi Moi.
That’s not relevant when we are talking about the public utilities, which the government controls.
> Just having state owned companies does not make a country communist.
I never said it does. I said having a one party state run by a communist party gives insights into the government and hence the public utilities.
> Utilties are state owned (EVN) but the capacity infra is private owned in part or majority.
The Vietnam government is happy to take your money but it doesn’t mean you’ll have say over how the SOE is run (hence the blanket request to reduce demand).
Or just the fact you get to bang your head against a wall for a while trying to navigate the state bureaucracy (if unwilling to buy some important people some coffee).
> This by definition is a lack of capacity
Capacity isn’t relevant to sharing of existing capacity. Whatever the capacity is or however much it wasn’t developed, there is still an opportunity for one company to “horse trade” capacity with another company.
The utility EVN and its subsidiaries is fairly hands off because of incompetence and corruption.
What ended up happening was most of the regional utilities went broke, and consolidated together, but are still kinda broke, so maintenance is weak and construction of capacity isn't the greatest, yet demand was only growing.
To solve this issue, there were some additional reforms pushed in the mid-2010s along with the FTAs skewed in Japan and South Korea's favor to allow majority ownership of capacity and infra by foreign players (most of whom are Japanese, Korean, and increasingly Chinese).
The utility EVN doesn't have a make or break stake in most of these JVs, and unlike China or even India, cannot push back, because VN just isn't a large enough market to justify those headaches.
The state capacity in VN sucks, but I think you are automatically assuming stuff in Vietnam works the same way as it does in China. It does not, because VN isn't the same size of market that China is, and the largest investors in the Vietnamese market (Japan, South Korea, China) can make Vietnam's life hell if they make it too business unfriendly. This has already started with Korean FDI increasingly moving to PH and TH recently.
I'm just speaking from mine and my SO's experience on this.
Private players often get hampered by these horribly run state enterprises. There's also the issue of pervasive corruption that ruins everything it touches.
I've done a lot of work within VN and my SO is herself VNese, so I've had the opportunity to travel and meet with operators there.
Most of the capacity that is built is done so by private players. While there are still a couple oversized SoEs, they cannot compete with the much larger Japanese, South Korean, Singaporean, and Chinese players because Vietnam has FTAs with all those countries.
A fridge produces about 100 times more energy than a phone.
Your claim is not supported by a large number of investigations, eg:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/08/17/links-17...
I suppose ultimately it comes down to how much a person cares about the negative externalities vs. inconvenience.