PyPSA-VN: An open model of the Vietnamese electricity system

Vietnam has tremendous potential for renewable energy. However, its renewable generation mix remains in its infancy, while demand grows rapidly year after year. In this work, we present an open dataset to model the Vietnamese electricity system implemented in Python for Power System Analysis (PyPSA) and use it to analyse a Vietnamese power development plan until 2030. We analyse two different meteorological datasets, the ERA5 and MERRA-2 reanalyses and use them to cost-optimise a future Vietnamese power system under an official power development plan as boundary condition and compare the findings. We show that differences in the results are small for power systems mostly based on conventional thermal generation.