Vietnam MOIT Sets Price Ceiling for Cross-Border Electricity Imports from China

Severity

MOIT's own implementing circular (09/2025/TT-BCT, the primary source confirmed above) establishes the procedural framework for setting generation and import price ceilings but does not itself state the USD 0.093/kWh figure — that number comes from Decision 1231/QĐ-BCT, which is corroborated consistently across Vietnamese press and legal-database secondary sources (Thanh Nien, Thu Vien Phap Luat) but could not be located as a directly fetchable primary-government URL within the research window. Severity is set at 2 (narrow, sector-specific price regulation rather than a broad tariff or ban) with mixed basis: the regulatory mechanism is primary-confirmed, the specific price figure is secondary-corroborated only.

Mechanism

Vietnam imports a modest volume of grid electricity from China via cross-border transmission lines serving northern border provinces (e.g. Ha Giang, Lao Cai), primarily to shore up local supply reliability where domestic transmission capacity is thin. Historically these imports were negotiated bilaterally between EVN and Chinese suppliers without a codified price ceiling.

MOIT Circular 09/2025/TT-BCT (effective 1 February 2025) introduced formal procedures for MOIT to build and approve both domestic generation price frameworks and, for the first time, an explicit "import price framework" (khung giá nhập khẩu điện) governing cross-border purchases. Decision 1231/QĐ-BCT, issued under that framework on 5 May 2025, sets the maximum price for electricity imported from China through the national grid at USD 0.093/kWh. EVN is directed to negotiate actual purchase prices with Chinese sellers at or below this ceiling.

Downstream implications

• Formalizes a price ceiling on a previously ad hoc bilateral electricity trade channel with

China, giving Vietnam a legal price lever over the relationship rather than leaving grid-import economics purely to EVN-Chinese-supplier negotiation.

• Marginal effect on China-Vietnam energy trade volumes (imports serve a narrow set of northern

border provinces), but establishes a repeatable regulatory template MOIT can reuse for future cross-border power-purchase frameworks (e.g. with Laos, whose hydropower exports to Vietnam are larger in volume).

• Price ceiling below prevailing market rates could, if binding, reduce Chinese suppliers'

willingness to sell into the Vietnamese grid at the margin, a liberalising-in-appearance but practically restrictive lever on supply security for the affected border provinces.

Open questions

• Was the USD 0.093/kWh ceiling ever binding in practice, or has actual EVN-China contract

pricing stayed comfortably below it?

• Has MOIT applied the same Circular 09/2025/TT-BCT import-price-framework procedure to any

other cross-border supplier (Laos, Cambodia)?

• Primary-source text of Decision 1231/QĐ-BCT itself (as opposed to the enabling circular) was

not locatable via public Vietnamese government portals within the research window; a future pass should retry vanban.chinhphu.vn or MOIT's own văn bản pháp luật search directly.