Malaysian firm to buy stake in five solar farms in Vietnam

A subsidiary of Malaysia’s largest power utility, Tenaga Nasional Berhad, plans to acquire a 39 percent stake in five Vietnamese solar power projects from Singapore’s Sunseap Group.

The farms were built last December in southern Vietnam and have a total capacity of 21.6 MW.

After selling 39 percent to TNB Renewables, likely this month, Sunseap will own a 51 percent stake in them.

President and CEO of TNB, Datuk Bahrain Din, said the deal would mark TNB’s entry into Vietnam’s fast-growing renewable energy and utility market.

Sunseap Group owns projects in Singapore, Australia, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and Cambodia.

In 2019, it completed the $150-million solar farm, the solar power plant CMX Renewable Energy Vietnam, one of the country’s largest in central Ninh Thuan Province.

TNB has projects in the UK, Kuwait, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, and Indonesia, and expects to have 8.3 GW of renewable energy by 2025.

Of the foreign investors in Vietnam’s renewables sector, the majority are from Thailand.

In 2020 Thailand’s Super Energy Corporation Public Company invested $456.7 million to build four solar plants in southern Vietnam, Loc Ninh 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Gulf Group increased its ownership of two solar farms in the southern province of Tay Ninh from 49 percent to 90 percent in the second quarter of last year.

In 2019, AC Energy, a subsidiary of the Philippines’ Ayala company, and Vietnam’s BIM Group established BIM/AC Renewables to develop projects in the central Ninh Thuan Province.