The Electricity of Vietnam’s An Khe Kanak Hydropower Plant in the Central Highlands of Gia Lai whose reservoir discharge last month wrecked havoc on local residents isn’t held accountable to the law.

Though An Khe has admitted its mistake in discharging water from its rain-swelled reservoir on the early morning of May 25, which flooded and destroyed properties of hundreds of households in Kbang District, and promised to compensate, the plant doesn’t accept the VND14 billion in damage that local authorities has estimated.

If An Khe doesn’t compensate, there is nothing in the law that says it has to.

“It’s difficult to fine hydropower plants for discharging floods, even if we know they don’t follow proper flood discharge processes,” said Do Quang Vinh, Head of the Industrial Safety Technology Department at the Ministry of Industry and Trade. “The utmost we can do is to tell them to examine where they have gone wrong in order to better co-ordinate with local authorities next time.”

According to Cao Anh Dung, the bureau’s deputy chief, Vietnam has only established flood discharge process guidelines for 6 out of a total 11 river basins countrywide. And for those areas that have a guideline, there is yet a legal framework to deal with violators.

“During inspection, we can only remind them to develop strategies to deal with floods and storms,” Dung said. “If next year we find that they haven’t done so, we will remind them, again.”

However, to make up for a lacking legal framework, the industry and trade ministry has requested local authorities to thoroughly inspect all small hydropower plants (which are directly licensed by local authorities and more likely to be operating without adequate environmental protection guidelines) and withdraw licenses of those that produce little electricity but affect local environments.

Do Duc Quan, vice director of the ministry’s energy bureau, said provinces including Lao Cai, Quang Nam and Khanh Hoa have proposed shutting down 20 small hydropower plants.

Quan said earlier, provincial People’s Committees countrywide had also proposed withdrawing licenses of 38 medium and small plants as well as scaling down 35 other projects that affect local environments.

According to the ministry’s statistics, Vietnam has a total 890 medium and small hydropower plant investment projects with a targeted capacity of 5,900MW.

But only 100 plants are now working with a total capacity of 600MW.

Source: Tuoi Tre