ASEAN grid back on agenda

Masato Kanda used his bid for a full five-year term as Asian Development Bank president to put the ASEAN Power Grid back at the center of the bank’s regional agenda. (tribune.net.ph) Kanda confirmed his re-election bid on April 22, 2026, ahead of the end of his current term in November 2026, and said the Manila-based lender would keep scaling up climate finance and regional connectivity work. He named the ASEAN Power Grid alongside Central Asia programs as priorities shaped by “geopolitical and economic shocks.” (tribune.net.ph) The bank had already moved from rhetoric to financing on April 7, when it launched a multi-partner trust fund for project preparation on cross-border energy and transmission links in Southeast Asia. ADB called it the first fund in the region dedicated to preparing these cross-border power projects. (adb.org) The ASEAN Power Grid is a plan to connect the electricity systems of the bloc’s 10 member states so countries can buy and sell power across borders instead of running more isolated national systems. The ASEAN Centre for Energy says the program is meant to expand from bilateral links to multilateral power trade that improves energy security, resilience, and connectivity. (aseanenergy.org) ASEAN governments and development banks have spent the past year rebuilding the financing architecture around that idea. In October 2025, ADB, the World Bank Group, ASEAN, and the ASEAN Centre for Energy launched an ASEAN Power Grid financing initiative tied to the bloc’s goal of stronger regional energy cooperation by 2045. (asean.org) The World Bank also added $7.7 million in June 2025 to an earlier $5 million grant for the ASEAN Centre for Energy to prepare grid projects under its broader $2.5 billion Accelerating Sustainable Energy Transition Program. That money was earmarked for the project preparation facility supporting the grid’s rollout. (worldbank.org) Kanda has repeated the message in official ASEAN meetings this month. At the ASEAN finance ministers and central bank governors’ meeting on April 10, he said ADB would support “accelerated action” on the ASEAN Power Grid as part of a broader response to weaker growth prospects and trade tensions. (adb.org) ADB’s own ASEAN Power Grid page says the target is fully integrated regional grid operation by 2045, a timetable that depends on new transmission lines, technical standards, and financing structures that let utilities trade electricity across borders. The ASEAN Centre for Energy says its secretariat is also working on an enhanced memorandum of understanding and related action plans for the project. (adb.org) (aseanenergy.org) That leaves Kanda’s re-election pitch doubling as a policy signal: ADB is tying its next leadership term to the slow, expensive work of making Southeast Asia’s power systems function more like a shared network. (tribune.net.ph)