Circular 62 for data centres: what Vietnam's BESS pricing framework means for your facility

Circular 62's scope is explicit and narrow. A project must meet three cumulative conditions to fall under the regulation:

1. Standalone — the BESS is its own asset, not integrated with a renewable generation plant (Circular 12/2025/TT-BCT covers that) and not owned by a Power Corporation (Circular 17/2025/TT-BCT covers that)
2. Grid-connected — the BESS supplies power to the national grid via a PPA with EVN, a Power Corporation, or (in future) a wholesale-market offtaker
3. Scale thresholds — 10 MW or more capacity AND 110 kV or higher grid connection voltage, AND developed under the revised Power Development Plan VIII (Decision 768/QĐ-TTg, April 2025)

A behind-the-meter BESS at a data-centre site fails two of these three on most projects: it is rarely connected at 110 kV, and it is not selling power to the grid — it is displacing grid imports for the customer's own consumption. Even a 10+ MW behind-the-meter BESS at a hyperscale campus remains out of scope because the power never leaves the customer's electrical boundary.

In practice: the regulation that governs behind-the-meter BESS at a data-centre site is the retail-tariff regime — Decision 1279/QĐ-BCT sets the VND/kWh rates, and Decree 146/2025/NĐ-CP will add a capacity charge for the largest customers from the 2028–2030 rollout.

4.1 · Grid stability and renewable integration

Vietnam's revised Power Development Plan VIII targets 10,000–16,300 MW of BESS by 2030, a roughly 40-fold increase on the original plan. That target is only achievable if BESS investors have bankable unit economics — which is what Circular 62 provides. The deployment of standalone utility-scale BESS at this scale directly supports grid stability in ways that matter to a data centre:

• Curtailment relief — the renewable generation that a data centre's Scope 2 reporting depends on (via DPPA or via commercial sourcing claims) is today routinely curtailed at 15–30% in high-penetration provinces like Ninh Thuan. Standalone BESS absorbs this curtailed energy and dispatches it later, restoring the renewable output that would otherwise be lost.
• Frequency regulation — utility-scale BESS provides sub-second frequency response that the existing thermal-heavy fleet cannot match. Data-centre load is particularly sensitive to frequency deviations; BESS-supported grids are measurably more stable.
• Peak reliability — evening peak reliability in Ho Chi Minh City, Binh Duong, Dong Nai, and the northern manufacturing belt — the provinces where most Vietnamese data centres are sited — has been under pressure for three years. The 10,000–16,300 MW BESS build-out is the primary planned mitigation.

In practice: a data centre evaluating a 10–15 year site lease in 2026 should view Circular 62 as the regulatory mechanism that makes Vietnam's grid incrementally more reliable over the lease term. This is not a direct project ROI input but a real site-selection factor for hyperscale buyers.

4.2 · Virtual PPA pathways with standalone BESS projects

Decree 57/2025/ND-CP governs direct power purchase agreements between renewable generators and large consumers. Circular 62 governs standalone grid-connected BESS. The intersection — a data centre signing a virtual PPA with a solar+BESS or wind+BESS project where the BESS element is a Circular-62-compliant standalone asset — is not yet operational because the amending decree to Decree 57 (expected Q2–Q3 2026) has not been issued, and the implementation of Resolution 253/2025 free-price negotiation is still in consultation.

But the mechanism is commercially useful and legally possible under the two regulations read together. Three configurations are already being explored by corporate offtakers:

1. Solar-paired BESS under a single DPPA — the BESS is co-located with a solar plant, governed by Circular 12/2025/TT-BCT, and the offtake is a single DPPA under Decree 57. This is the dominant near-term configuration and is not Circular 62 scope.
2. Standalone BESS as capacity-firming backstop — the data centre signs a primary DPPA with a solar or wind plant, and a secondary contract with a standalone Circular-62 BESS project that firms up the intermittent generation. Two offtake contracts, two regulatory regimes.
3. Pure virtual PPA with standalone BESS — purely financial; the data centre pays the BESS owner a contract for differences against a reference price, with no physical power flow between them. Likely the first configuration to reach precedent once Resolution 253 implementation resolves.

In practice: none of these configurations is contractable today in a clean form. All three are likely contractable by end-2026 as the Decree 57 amending decree issues and Circular 62's first annual price bracket is approved. Data centres with corporate 100% RE commitments should structure their 2026 procurement strategy to allow for these pathways as they become operational, rather than assuming a single bilateral DPPA is the only route.

4.3 · Circular 60 reclassification reinforcement

Circular 60/2025/TT-BCT reclassified third-party data centres from the manufacturing tariff to the commercial (kinh doanh) tariff effective 2 December 2025 — a 45–55% increase in blended electricity cost for most operators. That reclassification is not Circular 62 territory, but the two regulations interact in a useful way for data-centre strategy.

Under the commercial tariff at 22 kV, the peak-to-off-peak spread is VND 3,416/kWh versus VND 2,208/kWh on the manufacturing tariff — 55% wider. This makes behind-the-meter BESS at a data-centre site more economically valuable than at a manufacturing site. Circular 62 doesn't govern that behind-the-meter BESS, but the broader PDP8-revised policy logic that produced Circular 62 (grid flexibility, cost-reflective pricing, renewable-integration infrastructure) also produced Circular 60. The regulator's direction of travel is consistent: reward customers who can flatten their load profile, penalise those who cannot.

In practice: the intelligent data-centre investment response to Circular 60 is behind-the-meter BESS sized to capture the commercial-tariff peak-to-off-peak spread. That is governed by Decision 1279 and Decree 146, not Circular 62. But the political and regulatory conditions that make that BESS investment worthwhile were all created by the same PDP8-revised policy framework that produced Circular 62.