Vietnam’s Agribank is auctioning off the Phong Dien 1 wind power plant with a starting price of VND1,205 billion (US$49.6 million) after the firm behind the project Vietnam Renewable Energy Engineering (VREE) failed to meet its debt obligations , The Investor is reporting.
Background: Wind power producers were offered very attractive feed-in-tariffs for approved projects that were online by November 1, 2021. For firms that missed this deadline like VEER, however, there were no alternative pricing mechanisms. These wind power projects would need to wait for the Ministry of Industry and Trade to set a price before the state power provider EVN could buy the power they produced. These would take a year and a half to develop during which time firms either abandoned their projects or fed power to the grid but without payment which put a number of firms in financial distress, including VEER, apparently.