Vietnam's promising economic growth has led to energy shortage, growing coal imports, and increasing carbon emissions. The country's electricity demand annual growth rate has been 12% in recent years and is projected to be 8–9% by 2030. In Vietnam 40% of the land is dedicated to agriculture and thousands of inland water bodies are used for agriculture/aquaculture. Utilising even a small portion of them for Floating Photovoltaics (FPVs) would mitigate land-use conflicts and benefits agriculture and aquaculture. To demonstrate FPVs' potential, we selected a hydropower dam reservoir in the North and six irrigation reservoirs in the South. System Advisor Model (SAM) software was used to simulate the electricity generated if we cover 1%, 5%, and 10% of surfaces of these reservoirs. The results show a potential capacity close to 1 GWp and annual potential generation of 1.4 TWh if 1% of these surfaces were covered by FPVs. We also evaluated FPVs potential for four different types of water bodies in Vietnam: Lake, Lagoon, River and Without Classification. The results showed that the potential capacity, considering use of only of 1% of these water surfaces for FPVs is 3.7 GWp, and provides 5385 GWh generation, which highlights the significant contribution that FPVs can make to the renewable energy sector in this country. However, FPVs face some socio-technical barriers, including regulatory ambiguity about water rights, uncertainty about economic policies and limited information about their environmental impacts that could hamper the expansion of this technology, and need to be addressed through further research.

Key Messages • Vietnam’s electricity demand annual growth has been more than 12% in recent years, leading to rising coal imports. • Vietnam has been transformed from a food-insecure nation to a world-leading food exporter. • Vietnam has thousands of water bodies, used for agriculture/aquaculture offering excellent surfaces for deploying Floating Photovoltaic (FPVs) farms. • FPVs could significantly contribute to the energy sector in Vietnam by supplying clean electricity that could also be used for modernizing/mechanizing agriculture/aquaculture practices. • FPV faces some socio-technical barriers including regulatory ambiguity that could hamper expansion of this technology.