The ASEAN-German Energy Programme (AGEP), a jointly implemented programme by the ASEAN Centre for Energy (ACE) and Deutsche Gesellschaft fur International Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), is pleased to share the progress update of improving the ASEAN Energy Database System (AEDS). AEDS is a platform that records the official ASEAN statistic data and related energy news and policies providing the energy landscape of ASEAN and each of its Member States. Since it was launched in the 36^th ASEAN Ministers on Energy Meeting (AMEM) in 2018, AEDS has gone through several stages of enhancement throughout the years, from only providing data and statistics in the beginning to incorporating more content and visual improvement.

AGEP has been supporting ACE on AEDS enhancement since its first phase for automation of energy questionnaires verification-compilation into energy balance table (EBT) and web portal development. In AGEP Phase II, the support for AEDS continues to enhance its digitalisation, customisation, control, documentation, and dissemination. To execute the intents, the service request for improving the AEDS was initiated by AGEP, and later, a Consultant was selected and hired in May 2020, assisting the team. The improvement work was officially launched with a kick-off meeting in June 2020, which aimed at streamlining the assumption and expectation. The activities were followed by series of meetings to discuss the current system environment and data collection process, including the assessment part of the work.

Supporting the AEDS enhancement, a core team was formed, consisting of representatives from AGEP, consultant, ACE Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and ACE Data and Statistics team. During the assessment period, the development team found out that the ACE hardware server needs to upgrade to cater to the current and expected future services in supporting ACE operational-efficiency. Furthermore, the development team also discussed the optimisation of energy data collection and processing, as well as secured access management. When the process of the AEDS improvement is concluded, it is expected that ACE will also be equipped with the manual guidelines in the operational and maintenance of AEDS as well as living document for data collection, cleaning, storing, and extracting procedure.

In alignment with the overall objective of AGEP Phase II, the activities will strengthen ACE’s role as a regional centre of excellence for sustainable energy. By improving AEDS, the Programme expected the tool to enhance the efficiency of the ACE team on data collection, recording, and processing. Thus, allowing ACE to focus more on analytics and researches, which help ACE fulfilling its mandate to become the regional think tank, knowledge hub, and energy cooperation catalyst. (JM/YY)