Vietnamese renewable energy firm SolarBK has received a licence from the People's Committee of Da Nang City, Vietnam, for a 4.4MW solar PV project, which it claimed will be the first such plant set to be entirely implemented by Vietnamese engineers.

SolarBK is the Danang project owner and will act as EPC services provider. Meanwhile, the project will use PV modules from the local factory of its subsidiary, IREX. Tentatively, these will be Poly 320Wp modules, a company spokesperson told PV Tech.

The farm will be built on 6.7 hectares of the closed Khánh Sơn Landfill in Liên Chiểu District at a cost of VNĐ112 billion (US$5 million).

The spokesperson said: “We have worked with many parties in nearly five years to persuade them to ‘transform’ the garbage plot into the solar farm.”

Nguyen Duong Tuan, chief executive of SolarBK, said: “Our first solar farm will soon be realized. […] SolarBK will not only be the project owner, it will also become the first Vietnamese engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) company for a solar farm – while the IREX panels used will be the first bankable Vietnamese-made module.’

IREX owns a module factory with the potential for capacity of 300MW a year along with 200MW of solar cells

In the first half of 2017, SolarBK provided solutions for 1.5MW of solar projects within Vietnam.

Having release a feed-in tariff (FiT) policy in April, Vietnam’s final solar power purchase agreement (PPA) is still a cause for concern among representatives from the law and finance sectors.