Vietnam has millions of e-scooters and an unstable power supply. One might think that these two things signal trouble when put together, but here’s how some Vietnamese are using their e-scooters to improve stability of the electrical grid and help small businesses avoid blackouts.
In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s most populous city, power outages are quite common. They’re often scheduled or announced ahead of time, but power outages do occur on a weekly basis, in various parts of the city.
As a result, larger businesses will have a generator of some sort on hand to keep things running when the power goes out, but many Vietnamese have small, single-person proprietorships (think small shops, food carts and so on) that may not have the resources for something like that.
But there’s an active and enterprising community of e-scooter users who are trying to…