Biomass, traffic and Brit robs Saigon convenience store

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three disparate stories today that caught my eye.

The first is that there is a draft of new biomass generation feed-in tariffs (FiT):

This is sort of old news, but I haven’t written about it yet. And it caught my eye because I was talking to someone yesterday that knew someone trying to innovate in biomass. Maybe Vietnam would be a good location for that, given the new tariffs.

Source: BP, government targets

Source: BP, government targets

  • For combined heat and power (CHP) the tariffs is increased to 6.77 US cent per kWh. That’s up from 5.8 cents previously, for a 17% increase.

  • Other biomass projects get a FiT of 8.47 cents.

This compares to the updated draft solar tariffs of 7.09 cents per kWh for ground solar (floating is 7.69 cents). Rooftop solar is much higher at 9.35 cents, as we wrote about the other day.

Overall, though, this is a positive move. Right now, there are only 10 biomass projects, all around sugar mills (using the waste). The government wants to provide incentives for more construction. It is targeting to have more than 2% of electricity generation to come from biomass by 2030.

Second, traffic deaths are falling.

January traffic accident figures are out, and they are pretty good. We have talked before about the new drunk driving laws, and they seem to be working.

  • Traffic accidents: -14.9%

  • Traffic deaths: -18.9%

  • Severe injuries from traffic accidents: -14.9%

  • Slight injuries: -14.8%

The almost 20% drop in deaths is amazing, although the number is still high at 591 from 1,300 accidents. If this continues, the trend will be positive, meaning fewer accidents, deaths and injuries than in 2019.

In HCMC, deaths were actually down by almost a third over Tet.

Third, Brits are coming to Vietnam to rob convenience stores.

Actually, I am overstating things here, but a Brit did rob a convenience store. It seems so weird to me, because if he robbed a convenience store in the UK, we would probably have made off with so much more money!

He only got VND3m ($128), which is not much but actually a bit more than I expected. Anyway, he was arrested, and his life is going to be so much worse than if he hadn’t robbed the store, even if he was broke. Poor dumb man making very bad life decisions.