A consortium of foreign companies led by France’s Electricité de France has signed four agreements with Vietnam and received a license to build a USD 400 million power plant in the south of the country. Jean Pierre Serusclat, EDF general director for Asia, said the plant is one of the biggest foreign-invested projects in Vietnam and could open the door to further investment by EDF. EDF and its partners, Sumitomo Corp. and Tokyo Electric Power Co. International, have negotiated since December 1998 to build the 715mw gas-fired electricity plant, named Phu My 2.2. The contracts include a set of government guarantees to protect profit repatriation and other business rights, and a sales and purchase agreement for the sale of electricity from the plant to national power company Electricity of Vietnam. The consortium will operate the plant for 20 years and then turn it over to EVN. It will sell 4.7 billion kilowatts of electricity to EVN each year at 4.04 cents a kilowatt-hour. Construction of the plant will start in September 2002, and it will begin commercial operations by September 2004, Serusclat said. Vietnam plans to complete construction of the entire complex by 2005.
