Vietnam Weighs Aggregating Rooftop Solar, Storage and EVs Into Virtual Power Plants

Vietnam is laying early policy groundwork to take its power system past Time-of-Use (TOU) tariffs and industrial demand response and toward virtual power plants (VPPs), pv magazine and ESS News reported.

The design would pull distributed rooftop solar, behind-the-meter battery energy storage systems (BESS) and electric vehicles together as flexible grid assets. Instead of paying a handful of large industrial consumers to drop load at peak, the operator would call on thousands of customer-owned devices.

State utility EVN holds a near-monopoly on transmission and single-buyer dispatch in Vietnam's market architecture. Aggregation needs a counterparty able to contract with third-party aggregators and settle what they deliver, and that function currently sits with one entity.

Curtailment is already the binding constraint. Vietnam overbuilt solar, and severe grid bottlenecks and curtailment followed across central and southern provinces. Batteries sited behind the meter, close to the rooftop capacity that cannot export at midday, are one route to soaking up power the wires will not carry.

Electric vehicles enter from the demand side. A charging fleet is a controllable load before it is ever an export source, and bidirectional capability turns parked cars into storage the operator does not pay to build.

The reporting describes preparation, not a live market. It does not set out how output from third-party aggregators would be settled under single-buyer dispatch, which is the design question that decides whether small distributed assets can be paid for flexibility at all.

The gap between a tariff and an aggregated fleet is responsiveness. A TOU price signal moves consumption on a fixed clock, while a VPP answers network conditions as they arise, which is what a system carrying curtailed southern solar needs.