Feasibility study and development prospects of offshore wind power projects in Vietnam

Vietnam is a promising market for offshore wind power development because Vietnam is one of the countries having the largest wind power potential in Southeast Asia. However, some barriers such as high investment costs, complicated construction conditions, and long construction time have influenced the development of offshore wind power projects, thus, there is currently only one operational offshore wind power project. In this paper, the economic, technical, environmental efficiency of an offshore wind power project with a capacity of 30 MW in the Southern region of Vietnam is studied by using the Windpro program and the Retscreen software. The support policies of the government and obstacles in the investment process for offshore wind power projects are also analyzed. The research results show that the investment of case study offshore wind power project in the Southern region of Vietnam is economically feasible with the new Feed-in Tariff (FIT) price with the IRR of 18.6%, the NPV of $ 19,278,263, Benefit-Cost (B/C) number of 1.9 and the payback period of 8.3 years. However, the government needs to continue to improve support policies for offshore wind power in Vietnam, thus, incentivizing offshore wind farm projects can develop more in the next time.