Vietnam | Early Policy Framework Emerges for Rooftop PV, BESS and EV Virtual Power Plants

Vietnam is taking an early step toward a more flexible electricity market by exploring the development of Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) that can aggregate distributed energy resources.

According to a publication from Vietnam’s Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT), the emerging concept could connect:

☀️ Rooftop Solar PV🔋 Behind-the-Meter BESS🚗 Electric Vehicles⚡ Other Distributed Energy Resources (DERs)

Through centralized algorithms and control systems, thousands of distributed assets could potentially be coordinated as a single flexible power resource.

The operating model is relatively straightforward:

Midday solar generation → Store excess electricity → Evening peak discharge

This could become particularly relevant for Vietnam.

The country has experienced rapid solar deployment, while grid bottlenecks and renewable curtailment have emerged in some central and southern provinces.

Instead of relying exclusively on new generation and grid infrastructure, VPPs could provide another way to coordinate existing distributed resources and improve system flexibility.

However, the technology itself may not be the biggest challenge.

The more important question is:

How can distributed energy resources participate in Vietnam's electricity market in a transparent and economically viable way?

With EVN maintaining a dominant role in transmission and electricity dispatch, Vietnam will need clearer rules for DER aggregation, market participation, dispatch mechanisms and revenue models before VPPs can move from concept to commercial deployment.

This represents an important potential evolution for Vietnam's energy transition:

TOU Tariffs → Demand Response → BESS → DER Aggregation → Virtual Power Plants

For solar and storage developers, the development of a VPP framework could eventually create new opportunities beyond simply installing individual rooftop PV or BESS systems.

The next stage of Vietnam's distributed energy market may therefore be less about how many individual assets are installed, and increasingly about how effectively those assets can be coordinated as one flexible grid resource.