Vietnam’s power consumption per capita is lower than many other countries, but it leads the countries in terms of the electricity waste.

The Electricity of Vietnam and the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT) are attempting to apply higher electricity retail prices on cement and steel manufacturers because the two industries, using backward technologies, and are believed to “gobble up” too much electricity.

However, the plan has been facing the strong opposition not only from cement and steel manufacturers, but also from experts. They have affirmed that the majority of the existing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese businesses, not only cement or steel producers, have been using backward technologies.

Nguyen Ba Vinh, Deputy Chair and Secretary General of the Vietnam Science & Technology Association for Energy Saving and Efficiency, has noted that if EVN wants to charge high on big power consumers, it should target the paper, garment and textile or food processing production and many other industries which have been using the technologies even more out-of-date than cement or steel manufacturing.

According Dr. Duong Trung Kien from the Electricity University, some cement factories have been using the same technologies since 1986

Vinh said that in some industries, Chinese backward technologies which were born in 1960s still have been used.

Vinh, who visited many factories and enterprises, discovered that the producers now still use the imaginably old technologies.

“I could not imagine that I drank the beer made by a brewery with such backward technology. I did not dare to believe that I once used the tissues made at a factory with old and rusty machines,” Vinh said.

The latest reports conducted by VCCI or VCEM all have pointed out that using backward technologies is the common situation at most of Vietnamese enterprises, while the advanced technologies have been used only in a few industries.

A recent survey of the energy saving association found that Vietnam is among the countries with low power consumption level, but among the countries with the high power waste.

With the backward technologies, Vietnamese enterprises consume the power volume higher by 1.5 – 1.7 times than regional countries. While automatic engines, with inverters, have become popular in the world, Vietnamese still use old generation engines.

Vinh believes that a lot of the meters in use have been sourced from the junk shops in Hai Phong City or Bac Ninh province. Meanwhile, if enterprises renovate the technologies, they would be able to increase the production efficiency by 50 percent.

Vinh has noted that the technologies used in foreign invested enterprises area always better than that in Vietnamese ones.  It’s simply because foreign invested enterprises always strive for lowest possible expenses and highest possible profits. In order to do that, they understand that they need the best technologies.

While foreign invested enterprises always pay high attention to the energy saving, Vietnamese keep indifferent to the issue.

According to the Energy Saving Office, the industrial production growth is one of the major reasons behind the sharp increase of the energy intensity in Vietnam.

Industrial production and household use are the two biggest power consumers in Vietnam which consume 48 percent and 43 percent, respectively, of the total electricity consumption. Meanwhile, trade and public works consume 9 percent only.