The Vietnam Electricity Group inaugurated three submarine cable projects to transit power from the inland to island districts from October 2013 to September 2014. This was marked as a great achievement of Vietnam’s power industry, the Vietnam Economic News reported.

With the three submarine cable projects to Ly Son, Phu Quoc and Co To islands, the EVN has completed distribution, management and trading of electricity to 8 out of 12 island districts of the country.

These island districts are far from the mainland and have strategic positions in terms of security, national defence and economic development in the northern, central and southern regions.

According to Deputy Chairman of EVN Nguyen Tan Loc, the power supply projects to island districts received strong supports from the government, ministries and sectors and localities to complete these projects as soon as possible.
To complete these projects, the EVN had to deal with a tonne of work ranging from capital to technical issues.

The success of submarine cable projects to island districts proved EVN’s management capability. The EVN chose suitable solutions on raising capital, selecting relevant technical solutions, and conducting effective project management.

According to representative from EVN’s Sales Department, one of the difficulties when implementing those projects was raising capital and looking for technical solutions. The islands are tens of kilometres away from the mainland shores with complicated terrains, deep sea and unfavourable weather conditions. Furthermore, undertaking projects in the sea require experienced and skilful contractors and only a few contractors could meet these standards. Therefore, there were few options and the investment costs were usually very high.

Nguyen Thanh, the Deputy General Director of the Central Power Corporation (EVN CPC) said that although bidding packages were assigned to contractors and electricity companies, EVN CPC still had to make coordination and supervised to make sure that the works went smoothly and met quality and progress requirements. As this was the first time that EVN CPC acted as the investor of a project using new techniques, it had to study and learnt experience from previous projects and worked out plans to tackle rising issues during the construction process.-VNA