In early April, Cambodia broke ground on its first gigawatt-scale pumped-storage hydropower project, developed in Koh Kong province as a key project in China-Cambodia “production capacity cooperation”, notes Xinhua.
With this project, Cambodia will soon have the flexible storage capacity it needs to balance a grid increasingly powered by solar and wind, and a credible offer to regional electricity markets that have been watching the country’s renewable transition with growing interest. But a pressing question remains unanswered: as Cambodia’s power system becomes more digitally sophisticated, who will govern the data that keeps it running?
Worldwide, many major grid modernisation projects rely on international technology and expertise. Cambodia’s partnerships with the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Japan International Cooperation Agency, and technology companies reflect a practical reality: few countries build a 21st-century energy system entirely on their own.
Yet this is not a question about which foreign partners Cambodia should trust – it is about terms. For any country invested in energy sovereignty and long-term regulatory capacity, provisions for data governance must be embedded in every grid agreement from the outset, not added as an afterthought once the systems are already running.
Why data governance matters now
Cambodia’s power sector has expanded rapidly. Installed capacity reached nearly 6 gigawatts (GW) by the end of 2025, increasing by more than a quarter in just two years, while electricity consumption grew 12% that year. Twenty-three new energy projects approved for 2024–2029, including nearly 4GW of generation and 2GW of battery storage, are now moving into the construction phase.
The government’s commitment to the energy transition, with pledges such as reaching 70% renewable energy in Cambodia’s power mix by 2030, has attracted multilateral investment from the World Bank and ADB, alongside technology companies including Huawei, which signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Mines and Energy in August 2025 on smart grids, energy efficiency, and skills development for Cambodian engineers.
“This initiative will catalyse investment in projects that meet international standards, while nurturing opportunities for our students, engineers and local enterprises,” said Keo Rottanak, Cambodia’s Minister of Mines and Energy, at the signing.
The country’s energy ministry has demonstrated the institutional ambition for this transition. Extending that ambition to a data governance framework is a natural and necessary next step.
Running a grid with large shares of variable sources such as solar and wind requires real-time monitoring, automated load forecasting, and rapid response to shifts in supply and demand. Electricité du Cambodge, the state utility, already operates a National Control Centre built around a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system that gathers real-time data. Advanced metering infrastructure is also being integrated with digital management platforms across the network to enable two-way communication between the utility and customers.
The operational data flowing through these systems, such as load forecasts, frequency measurements, incident logs and dispatch schedules is becoming as strategically significant as the physical infrastructure itself.
The challenge, then, is not the foreign nature of the technology, but the terms under which such software enters the system. Smart-grid and battery-storage contracts that do not specify data ownership, storage locations, and audit rights for software – to inspect how systems operate, verify data flows, and check for security vulnerabilities – risk turning vendor relationships into structural dependencies as they leave the utility with little power over the systems. It leaves the utility locked into a single provider who has exclusive control, unable to switch without significant cost or disruption.
Such dependency carries everyday costs. A regulator who needs to audit a system or bring in a new supplier to take over system management may have to pay whatever the original vendor charges to ensure cooperation on the transition, as proprietary software leaves no competition. The alternative is to operate without security patches on the software. Such dependencies are difficult to unwind once the hardware is installed, the software is embedded, and institutional knowledge is outside the country.
If the original vendor’s fees are prohibitive, the utility might opt to operate without those security updates, leaving the power grid open to cyberattacks, which the International Energy Agency (IEA) notes is a substantial and growing threat. The 2015 cyberattack on Ukraine’s power grid, described by the IEA as the first confirmed cyberattack against an electricity network, disconnected around 225,000 customers after attackers gained unauthorised access to control systems and manually switched off substations.
Cambodia can strengthen its position against such dependencies and threats by ensuring strong terms are negotiated while grid projects are still on the drawing board and not after implementation.
A regional dimension that raises the stakes
The stakes are rising as Cambodia becomes increasingly embedded in the Asean Power Grid (APG), the regional initiative to enable cross-border electricity trade across the bloc’s ten member states by 2045.
Cambodia already buys power from Vietnam and Laos, with imports expected to reach nearly 6% of total supply in 2026. Singapore has conditionally approved import of one gigawatt of low-carbon electricity from Cambodia, and since 2024 a Lao–Cambodia–Singapore working group has been coordinating the next phase of cross-border electricity trade, including facilitating regulatory approval. The Lao–Thailand–Malaysia–Singapore Power Integration Project offers an early preview of what regional integration means operationally: four national grids sharing real-time data on power flows and outage notifications to keep the lights on across borders.
“The epicenter of growth – the need for energy – will be places like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand. And the center of clean energy supply will be in places like the Lao PDR and Cambodia,” said Chhe Lidin, Undersecretary of State for Cambodia’s energy ministry, at the Asia Clean Energy Forum last June. He added that to “get that electron moving… we need a different way of thinking, political will, and creative financial mechanisms”.
Cambodia is moving towards the same level of integration, but the data-sharing frameworks governing this process are still taking shape. Asean energy ministers signed an Enhanced APG memorandum of understanding in October 2025, but the technical, regulatory and policy details are still being operationalised, and most cross-border arrangements amongst bloc members continue to rely on bilateral agreements. Cross-border electricity trade can help Cambodia monetise its renewable energy surplus, attract energy storage investment, and build grid resilience through interconnection.
But cross-border power trade also requires cross-border data flows. “Data sharing is the backbone of multilateral power trade. Without consistent, standardized information, we can’t plan, benchmark, or build trust among utilities and investors,” said Akbar Dwi Wahyono, a research analyst at the ASEAN Centre for Energy, at the forum. Real-time load profiles, frequency measurements that monitor and regulate the grid, and dispatch schedules generated inside Cambodia’s National Control Centre will increasingly need to be exchanged with regional system operators.
The legal conditions governing that exchange must be defined before the digital architecture is locked in. Even for a smaller grid system like Cambodia’s – classified by regional analysts as only moderately ready for full APG participation – this is not an abstraction. Long-term infrastructure agreements typically lock in governing law and data storage arrangements early, narrowing the regulatory choices available to future Cambodian administrations.
Three gaps Cambodia can address
Cambodia can continue its fast-paced energy transition while also strengthening how it governs grid data. The key is to build data governance into existing momentum.
One practical step is to make data rules a routine part of new grid and storage contracts while projects are still being designed: specifying where operational data will be stored, who can access it, and what audit rights Cambodian institutions will hold. Once equipment is procured, contracts signed, and systems commissioned, the leverage to insist on them shrinks considerably.
A second step is to require that new digital infrastructure follow common interoperability and cybersecurity standards. Cambodia’s grid may be managed by multiple administrations over multiple decades. Future governments need to be able to upgrade, cross-check, or change technologies without being locked into proprietary platforms they cannot audit or override.
A third area is human capacity. Contracts can include audit rights, but these mean little if Cambodian engineers and regulators do not have the technical knowledge to exercise them. Major energy partnerships should therefore include structured training for such staff on data systems, cybersecurity, as well as enforcement of regulatory provisions and compliance. Data governance provisions that cannot be operationalised from within the country are, in practice, no protection at all.
For Cambodia’s energy transformation, the next frontier is ensuring that its digital grid infrastructure is governed with the same strategic clarity that has driven its physical build-out. The data-governance terms taking shape today will define Cambodia’s regulatory independence for decades.
