Ajello Fellows Map Environmental Impact of Vietnam Power Plants

Valuable data about Vietnam’s electricity grid, including demand trends, air pollution levels and proximity to populated areas, is now available for the public’s use thanks to a research project by international students Nguyen Phan Bao Linh and Yu En Hsu.

Hsu and Nguyen, who received Ajello fellowships to conduct their research and create the Vietnam Power Plants database, hope others will be able to utilize their work. They have published their data on GitHub’s open-access forum. Hsu felt “It would be a public good and everyone can take advantage and benefit from it.”

The project met a need for Nguyen and Hsu. When the pandemic hit, they reached out to their favorite professor for help navigating the uncertainties of finishing the master of public administration program at the Maxwell School. They worried about finding internships required to complete the Data Analytics Certificate and feared having to leave the program.

“They’re both excellent students and that would have been a real loss,” says their professor, economist Peter Wilcoxen, director of the Center for Environmental Policy and Administration and Ajello Professor of Energy and Environmental Policy.

The fellowship funding “gave us the flexibility to quickly put together a project that let them use their unique skills and abilities to create a valuable resource for sustainability researchers worldwide,” says Wilcoxen.

Nguyen and Hsu first assessed the existing grid and then evaluated Vietnam’s plans for future sustainability. Says Nguyen, “During the process, we realized there’s no way for us to assess the grid if we cannot create a master list of operating plants.”

They set out to acquire, translate, verify and consolidate all existing power plant data into a master list. They searched Vietnamese government documents, Google and the World Resource Institute to verify operational power plants. “Then we spent a few weeks translating it from Vietnamese to English, English to Viet- namese,” says Nguyen. They ensured the data was accurate by cross-checking and verifying coordinates.

When Hsu and Nguyen finished the list of operational power plants, they analyzed the data and saw an increase in electricity from coal and overall electricity use in the past two decades. They made policy recommendations for power plants to be either updated or closed, based on their fuel type, air pollution emissions and proximity to dense population centers.

Hsu and Nguyen are grateful to Wilcoxen and James Ajello ’76 M.P.A., who created the professorship and provides funding for the fellowships. “A very important part of donor sponsored programs is to take away the burden of thinking about money when you are working on a wicked problem that requires you to invest a lot of time,” Nguyen says. “That allowed us to pour ourselves into this project.”

—Chad Chambers