About 97 percent of residents in the Mekong Delta province of Soc Trang are expected to gain electricity access by the Lunar New Year holiday in late February next year, said Huynh Minh Hai, Director of the Electricity of Vietnam (EVN)’s Soc Trang Power Company.

Over the past years, the company has paid heed to expanding the power grid to rural areas which are mainly inhabited by Khmer ethnic people, he noted.

Notably, a project worth 305.4 billion VND (14.5 million USD) to develop the power system was completed in 2012, providing electricity for 20,192 households, mostly of Khmer people. All the target households didn’t have to pay any fees for facilities from power lines to meters.

The project’s second phase, costing 212.57 billion VND (10.1 million USD), are near completion as more than 90 percent of the workload has already been done. This phase is carried out province-wide with 16,784 household beneficiaries and hoped to raise the total number of households accessing electricity across the province to 314,866, or 96.9 percent.

Meanwhile, the third phase with an investment of 100.1 billion VND (over 4.76 million USD) will be implemented in 2015 to supply power to 8,575 households.

In the years ahead, the power company will go on with more large-scaled projects to ensure power supply to local resident as well as shrimp farms, Hai said.

EVN plans to bring electricity to almost all rural households by 2020. So far, all districts, over 99 percent of communes, and 98 percent of rural households across Vietnam have had access to electricity.-VNA