Going to work all day, mainly using electricity during peak hours
After work at 5:30 PM, Ms. Le Thi Nga - a worker in Dong Van Industrial Park (Ninh Binh) - rushed home to pick up her children, cook rice, bathe, and clean up. This is also the time when the family uses many electrical appliances such as air conditioners, rice cookers, induction cookers, washing machines, and water heaters.
If the peak hour electricity price is applied from 5:30 PM to 10:30 PM, almost all activities of my family fall into this time frame. During the day, my husband and I go to work and my children go to school, so it is difficult to switch cooking or using air conditioning to another time to save electricity," Ms. Nga said.
Ms. Nga's story is the reality of many workers and laborers working during office hours. Most of the time in the day they are at factories and offices, only returning home in the evening, so essential needs such as cooking, bathing, studying, cooling are all concentrated at this time frame.
From an expert's perspective, Dr. Nguyen Quoc Viet - Lecturer at the University of Economics (Vietnam National University, Hanoi) said that it is necessary to clearly distinguish the subjects affected by this policy, which are households, residents, and ordinary people, from businesses and production and business units.
According to the explanation of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the application of electricity prices according to peak and low hours is aimed at adjusting consumption habits, limiting electricity use during peak hours and switching to electricity consumption during low hours. However, if considered in reality, there is a very large difference between businesses and households. For manufacturing and business enterprises, they can proactively adjust production plans to take advantage of low electricity price hours.
Meanwhile, for households and people, the ability to shift consumption behavior and change electricity use habits is very difficult. If viewed from an economic perspective, this is a group with a less elastic bridge line according to price. In other words, even if peak hour electricity prices increase, their electricity demand cannot decrease much. The reason is that workers have to go to work during the day and most of the family's living needs are concentrated in the evening," Dr. Nguyen Quoc Viet emphasized.
According to experts, adjusting electricity prices to solve difficulties in mobilizing electricity sources can be applied to businesses, because they have the ability to adjust production. However, if this burden is shifted to the people, it will be very difficult to adapt.
Conflict with business peak hours
Analyzing further, Dr. Nguyen Quoc Viet said that this proposal is also contradictory to previous decisions on adjusting peak and off-peak hours applied to the production, business and service sectors. When the peak hours of enterprises are adjusted, enterprises have to reorganize production activities, promote production during the day, arrange overtime and mobilize more labor during low hours.
This means that workers have to return home more often in the evening and at night, and cannot return at other times. Thus, the adjustment of the time frame applied to businesses in the past has increased the electricity consumption demand of workers in the evening, especially for low-income people.
Dr. Nguyen Quoc Viet noted the group of migrant workers and tenants in big cities. Although regulations require landlords to sell electricity at the right price, in reality, tenants often have to pay a level close to the highest level. If the peak hour electricity price is applied, the cost burden will be greater.
Many households and individuals both use electricity for daily life and do small businesses, online sales or part-time work. When peak hour electricity prices increase, these small livelihoods will also be significantly affected.
What is more concerning is that the most vulnerable groups are low-income people. They are almost unable to shift their electricity use to low-off-peak hours. This is an issue that needs to be considered when evaluating the proposal to apply hourly electricity prices to domestic electricity" - Dr. Nguyen Quoc Viet emphasized.
