Offshore Wind and the JETP: The $15 Billion Promise That Has Not Yet Turned a Turbine

Offshore wind is the clearest example of Vietnam wanting an outcome without yet being willing to write the rules that would produce it. The resource is exceptional, the manufacturing base exists, foreign developers arrived early with billions in intent, and international donors offered concessional capital. What has been missing is the unglamorous legal plumbing — survey licences, ownership rules, a tariff, a grid plan — that turns a wind speed into a financed project. This article covers the resource, the nearshore wind that did get built, the developers who came and went, the mechanics and disappointments of the JETP, and the 2025 rules that attempt to restart the sector on state-led terms. It is part of the Vietnam Company Stories hub.

Why is Vietnam’s offshore wind resource considered so good?

Vietnam has more than 3,000 kilometres of coastline, a strong and consistent monsoon wind regime off the south-central coast and a broad, shallow continental shelf in the south where fixed-bottom turbines can be installed in water under 50 metres deep. The combination is rare in Southeast Asia and comparable to the North Sea in resource quality.

The World Bank’s 2021 roadmap put the country’s technical potential at around 475 gigawatts, split between fixed and floating, and suggested that Vietnam could realistically install 5 to 10 gigawatts by 2030 and 70 gigawatts by 2050 with the right policy. That was ambitious but not fanciful: Taiwan, starting later with a smaller resource, had installed over 2 gigawatts by 2023 and had a pipeline many times larger.

The geography also aligns with demand, at least partly. The best winds are off Ninh Thuận and Bình Thuận, the same provinces that host the solar clusters described in the solar boom story, and they are within reach of the 500 kV backbone and of the industrial load around Ho Chi Minh City. The northern Gulf of Tonkin has a weaker resource but is closer to the industrial parks of Hải Phòng and Quảng Ninh, where supply is tightest.

Vietnam additionally has an industrial base that most emerging markets lack. Petrovietnam’s engineering arm PTSC and private yards around Vũng Tàu already fabricate foundations, substations and jackets for offshore wind farms in Taiwan and Europe; CS Wind, the Korean tower maker, has a large plant in Bà Rịa–Vũng Tàu; and the domestic steel industry led by Hoa Phat can supply plate. The supply chain exists; it just serves other countries’ wind farms.

What was built under the 2018 wind tariff, and why does it matter?

Decision 39 of 2018 offered a feed-in tariff of 8.5 US cents per kilowatt-hour for onshore wind and 9.8 cents for offshore wind, defined loosely enough to include intertidal and nearshore projects, for plants operating by 1 November 2021. About 4 gigawatts of wind was connected by the deadline, almost all of it onshore or nearshore, and a further 60-odd projects missed it.

The nearshore projects are the closest Vietnam has come to offshore wind. In the Mekong Delta provinces of Bạc Liêu, Sóc Trăng, Trà Vinh and Bến Tre, developers built turbines on monopiles in the mudflats and shallow water within a few kilometres of shore, connected by causeways and medium-voltage lines. The first, Bạc Liêu, dates from 2013; the 2021 deadline produced a rush of similar projects. They qualified for the 9.8-cent offshore tariff because the definition rested on location relative to the shoreline rather than on water depth or distance.

The deadline rush repeated the solar pattern. Construction in 2021 was hampered by pandemic lockdowns that delayed turbine deliveries and foreign technicians, and dozens of projects reached completion weeks or months late, missing the tariff. Those stranded wind projects, along with stranded solar, were the transitional projects that waited until 2023 for a ceiling price and then negotiated with EVN for months more.

The episode matters for genuine offshore wind because it consumed the political appetite for a tariff. Having watched a fixed price produce a construction race, grid congestion and an inspection scandal, the Ministry of Industry and Trade decided that future capacity would be allocated by auction or negotiation, and then took several years to design either.

Who came to build offshore wind, and why did they leave?

Between 2019 and 2022 most of the world’s major offshore wind developers opened offices in Hanoi: Ørsted with T&T Group, Equinor, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, Mainstream Renewable Power, Enterprize Energy, PNE of Germany, and Macquarie’s Corio. By 2024 Ørsted had stopped development and Equinor had closed its office, citing the absence of a workable framework.

Ørsted was the bellwether. The Danish company signed a memorandum with T&T Group, a Vietnamese conglomerate, in 2021 to develop several gigawatts off Bình Thuận and Ninh Thuận, and it lobbied publicly for a pilot mechanism that would allow the first projects a negotiated tariff. When the 2023 power plan included a 6-gigawatt target without any accompanying mechanism, and when the ministry made clear that no tariff would be offered, Ørsted paused all Vietnamese development in mid-2023 as part of a global retrenchment. Equinor followed in August 2024, closing its Hanoi office after concluding that the market would not open on a timeline that justified the cost.

Others stayed but slowed. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners continued to develop the 3.5-gigawatt La Gàn project off Bình Thuận, having spent years on early studies. PNE kept its 2-gigawatt Bình Định proposal alive. Mainstream’s Phú Cường project off Sóc Trăng remained on paper. Each had invested tens of millions of dollars in development without a route to a contract.

The developers’ complaints were consistent and specific. They could not legally survey the seabed, because the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment suspended survey licences in 2022 pending a legal basis and did not restore them. They did not know whether foreign majority ownership would be permitted, given defence sensitivities about the sea. They had no tariff and no auction. And the EVN power purchase agreement, as discussed in the EVN story, offered no curtailment protection, no government guarantee and no international arbitration, which for a $5 billion project is disqualifying.

What is the Just Energy Transition Partnership and what did it promise?

The JETP, announced on 14 December 2022, is a political agreement between Vietnam and an International Partners Group comprising the EU, the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Denmark and Norway, pledging to mobilise $15.5 billion over three to five years to support Vietnam’s shift from coal to renewables.

The structure mirrored earlier JETPs for South Africa and Indonesia. Half the money, $7.75 billion, was to come from public sources: development banks, export credit agencies and bilateral agencies, mostly as concessional loans with a small grant component. The other half was to be mobilised by private financial institutions under the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, including HSBC, Standard Chartered, Citi, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Macquarie, Mizuho, MUFG, SMBC, Prudential and Shinhan, as commercial lending to bankable projects.

In return, Vietnam committed to targets that were subsequently written into the power plan described in the PDP8 story: peaking power-sector emissions by 2030 rather than 2035, capping coal at about 30 gigawatts, raising renewables to 47 percent of generation by 2030, and developing a Resource Mobilisation Plan setting out how the money would be used. That plan, published at COP28 in December 2023, listed priority areas including grid upgrades, offshore wind, storage, and the early retirement of coal plants.

From the outset, observers noted what the deal did not include. There was no specific offshore wind mechanism, no agreement on who would bear the cost of retiring coal plants that had decades of contracted life, and no resolution of the power purchase agreement terms that would let the private half of the money actually be lent.

Why has JETP disbursement been so slow?

By 2025 only a small fraction of the $15.5 billion had reached actual projects, because the money was structured as loans to be matched against a pipeline of bankable projects, and Vietnam had not produced that pipeline. The private half required contracts that did not exist, and the public half moved at the pace of development-bank procedures.

The Vietnamese side has been candid about the terms. Officials have said publicly that concessional loans at rates close to market, denominated in foreign currency, were not attractive for a country that could borrow domestically, and that the grant component, estimated at around $300 million, was too small to change project economics. They wanted the partners to help write bankable structures and to take on project risk; the partners wanted Vietnam to reform the contract terms first. Each side waited for the other.

The domestic political context has also complicated matters. Several environmental campaigners who had advocated for coal phase-out, including Ngụy Thị Khanh, an internationally recognised anti-coal advocate, and the lawyer Đặng Đình Bách, were imprisoned on tax charges in 2022 and 2023. Foreign governments raised the cases, Vietnam treated them as domestic legal matters, and the JETP secretariat under the Ministry of Industry and Trade moved cautiously. The partnership was signed by governments that had to explain to their own legislatures why they were financing a country that had jailed climate activists.

The withdrawal of the United States from the JETPs in early 2025, part of a broader retreat from international climate finance, removed a significant member of the partners group, though the US contribution had always been modest relative to Japan and the EU. The remaining partners have continued, with the first meaningful transactions — grid financing through the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, and technical assistance for offshore wind frameworks — taking shape slowly.

What did the 2024 Electricity Law and 2025 decrees change?

The amended Electricity Law passed in November 2024 gave offshore wind a legal identity for the first time, and Decree 58 of March 2025 set out the incentives: exemption from sea-area use fees during construction and for years after, a minimum offtake of 80 percent of contracted output for 12 years for projects operating before 2031, and a preference for state enterprises and experienced developers in the first wave.

The decree also settled, at least on paper, the questions that had frozen the market. Seabed surveys are to be carried out or authorised by the state, with the results made available to selected developers, removing the need for each developer to obtain its own licence. Foreign investors may participate but must demonstrate prior offshore wind experience and partner with a Vietnamese entity; the state reserves the right to assign the earliest projects to state groups. Grid connection is to be planned centrally, with the transmission corridors for the southern wind zones included in the revised power plan.

In practice, the first projects have been assigned to the state. Petrovietnam, through PTSC, and EVN were named to develop pilot projects, with the PTSC–Sembcorp project off the south coast, intended to export around 1.2 gigawatts to Singapore via subsea cable and already holding a Singaporean conditional import licence, the most advanced. The Petrovietnam story sets out why the group was chosen and what else it has been asked to carry.

The revised power plan pushed the domestic target to 6 to 17 gigawatts by 2035, effectively conceding that nothing would be commissioned by 2030. For foreign developers that had planned around the earlier date, the new framework offers a clearer path but a smaller and later role, at least until the pilots demonstrate that a Vietnamese offshore project can be financed and built.

What does the offshore wind and JETP experience mean for founders, investors and operators?

The lesson is that in Vietnam the binding constraint on large infrastructure is the state’s willingness to write enforceable contracts, not capital, technology or resource. Investors who assumed that a target in a national plan implied a mechanism to reach it have consistently been disappointed; those who built around the supply chain or around export routes have done better.

For developers, the message from the 2025 rules is to accept a junior role in the first wave. The pilots will be state-led and probably financed with Japanese, Danish or multilateral money; a foreign developer’s realistic entry is as technical partner, equipment supplier or minority equity holder, learning the local process before the second wave of auctions. Trying to secure a multi-gigawatt site independently, as the 2019–2022 entrants did, proved to be a way of spending money on development that the state would later reorganise.

For the broader question of foreign investment in Vietnam, the offshore wind story is a corrective to the manufacturing narrative. The country has been extraordinarily successful at attracting factories, as the China Plus One story shows, because factories need land, labour, power and export access, all of which the state can deliver quickly. Offshore wind needs long-term contracts, dispute resolution and regulatory predictability, and the state has been slow to deliver those because they constrain its own future discretion.

For the JETP partners, the Vietnamese case suggests that pledges without pre-agreed contract terms produce headlines rather than turbines. The money is still on the table, the resource is still exceptional, and the government’s demand for power is still growing at 10 percent a year. What has to change is small in drafting terms and large in political terms: a power purchase agreement that a foreign bank will lend against. Until that exists, the $15 billion promise remains a promise.

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