On October 6, Sumitomo Corp. organized the ground-breaking ceremony of Van Phong 1 coal-fired power project after 12 years of waiting. Entailing the construction of a new supercritical coal-fired power plant with a generation capacity of 1,320 megawatts (MW) in Van Phong Special Administrative-Economic Zone (SAEZ)in Vietnam’s Khanh Hoa province, Van Phong 1 is a build-operate-transfer (BOT) power generation project that will sell electricity to EVN (Vietnam’s state-owned power company) over a period of 25 years. Total project costs should reach about $2.58 billion and will generate 9 billion kWh per year.
The project was implemented in 2007, however, it was not until July 2017 that the Ministry of Planning and Investment granted the investment registration certificate for Sumitomo. In October 2018, the investor official signed the BOT contract and power selling contract with partners while simultaneously receiving government guarantee.
It has been 12 years since the investor expressed interest in the project and land clearance was finished in May 2019.
At the ground-breaking ceremony, Nguyen Tan Tuan, chairman of the Khanh Hoa People’s Committee, said the Van Phong 1 coal-fired power project is the largest industrial project in the province so far.
