Project Management & Coordination

The Pacific Island countries and territories face energy regulatory challenges that are as distinctive as their geography. Each country is a small, isolated market with limited technical capacity, yet each must maintain its own regulatory framework for electricity tariffs, service quality, and utility oversight. The result, across 22 jurisdictions spanning millions of square miles of ocean, is fragmentation: inconsistent approaches to tariff setting, uneven regulatory capacity, and limited ability to learn from regional peers or speak with a collective voice on energy policy. The Office of the Pacific Energy Regulators Alliance (OPERA) was established to address exactly this challenge: bringing together energy regulators from across the Pacific to share knowledge, build capacity, and develop more consistent regional approaches to regulation. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) hired DHInfrastructure to help OPERA fulfill that mandate.

Our work with OPERA required coordinating across a diverse set of regulatory institutions simultaneously—each at a different stage of regulatory development and with different priorities and constraints. We began by reviewing the regulatory framework across Pacific countries, identifying issues related to tariffs, utility sustainability, and renewable energy development. We also compiled a regional information database covering legislation, regulations, tariff guidelines, and national energy and climate strategies—a resource that gave OPERA and its members a shared library of regional knowledge to draw on and contribute to. This foundation informed a sustained program of capacity building and policy dialogue activities—covering tariff setting methodologies, Excel-based financial modeling for regulatory staff, and public consultation processes—delivered in a way that built on each country's existing capacity rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all approach. We prepared recommendations for establishing a regulator in the Solomon Islands, compared tariff setting methodologies across the Pacific to identify areas of convergence and divergence, and conducted the annual regional regulator benchmarking study that gave OPERA and its members a consistent basis for tracking progress over time. In a follow-on engagement, we developed a communications strategy and action plan for the OPERA Secretariat’s engagement with donors, consultants, and other Pacific regional bodies, while also providing capacity building support to regulators on communications planning and public consultation in the tariff-setting process, helping OPERA members engage more effectively with the utilities, governments, and consumers it serves.

The engagement illustrates the particular demands of program management in a regional, multi-country context: coordinating technical assistance, knowledge sharing, analytical work, and policy dialogue across the Blue Pacific with individuals of diverse areas and levels of expertise, as well as different legal and institutional frameworks, all while maintaining a coherent program that serves OPERA's collective objectives rather than any single country's priorities.

Mongolia's water sector faces a challenge common to many rapidly developing countries: the cost of providing safe, reliable water services is rising, but tariffs have historically been set well below cost recovery, leaving utilities dependent on operating subsidies. The Mongolia Water Compact, a USD 350 million agreement between the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and the Government of Mongolia, aimed to address the supply side of this problem by funding major new water infrastructure for Ulaanbaatar. But new infrastructure brings higher costs—and as tariffs rise to cover those costs, low-income households risk being priced out of services they depend on. The Water Services Regulatory Commission (WSRC), Mongolia's water sector regulator, needed both the analytical tools and the institutional capacity to navigate this tension: setting tariffs that would put the sector on a sustainable financial footing while designing targeted subsidies that would protect vulnerable households from the impact of higher prices. MCA-Mongolia hired DHInfrastructure to lead a multidisciplinary team of international and local consultants with expertise in utility regulation, tariff design, financial modeling, and consumer subsidy policy—to work directly with the WSRC to address these challenges.

Our work spanned five interconnected workstreams delivered over the course of the engagement. We began with a comprehensive assessment of the WSRC's tariff department, identifying capacity gaps and developing an institutional strengthening strategy with clear objectives, measurable performance indicators, and a work plan for implementation and then led the implementation of that strategy throughout the engagement. In parallel, we supported the WSRC and relevant government entities in developing a national household water affordability policy, analyzing the current subsidy regime, and designing targeted consumer subsidy and customer assistance program options suited to Mongolia's institutional context. We built a tariff simulation model that allowed the WSRC to assess combinations of tariff structures and consumer subsidy options against agreed performance criteria, and provided the training and hands-on support needed to ensure the Commission's staff could use it independently after the engagement. We also developed a Cost Recovery Sustainability Plan that documented recommended tariff structures and subsidy arrangements for the period covered by the tariff modeling, and revised the WSRC's key regulatory instruments—including its tariff methodology, tariff proposal tool, cost allocation guidelines, and internal procedures for reviewing tariff proposals—to align with the new approach.

Pacific Island power utilities face a distinctive set of challenges: small, isolated markets, heavy dependence on imported fuel, limited technical capacity, and exposure to climate risks that threaten both infrastructure and demand. The Pacific Power Association (PPA), the region's leading platform for utility cooperation and capacity building, PPA had long produced annual benchmarking reports. But the underlying process—year-by-year data collection through submitted spreadsheets, with uneven participation—limited what the reports could reveal. Addressing the region’s challenges required a more durable foundation: a systematic, comparable basis for measuring how utilities were performing, identifying where they were falling short, and tracking progress over time. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) hired DHInfrastructure to build that foundation.

DHInfrastructure designed and developed the Pacific Regional Infrastructure and System Metrics (PRISM) platform: a comprehensive KPI database, web application, and benchmarking dashboard system covering operational, financial, governance, safety, and gender-related metrics across PPA's member utilities. We led a team combining utility sector expertise with web development capabilities, coordinating remotely with 18 utilities across 16 countries—each with different data systems, reporting practices, and institutional capacities. We began with a review of PPA members' existing performance reporting and disclosure processes, using those findings to design a reporting architecture that was rigorous enough to support meaningful benchmarking while practical enough for utilities with limited data management resources. We developed the database, web application, and dashboards; and established data governance policies and access procedures aligned with members' confidentiality requirements. We also organized regional workshops and provided training for utility personnel on data reporting and management.

Building on the PRISM platform established in the first phase of the engagement, DHInfrastructure is now enhancing the system's capabilities in response to priorities identified by PPA members. We are integrating AI capabilities, including tools for automated report generation, natural-language querying, data validation, and AI-assisted data entry and quality control. We are also incorporating Balanced Scorecard strategy maps to allow each utility to track performance against its own business improvement targets; expanding data collection to cover additional renewable energy and energy storage KPIs; developing a commercial sustainability framework, including tiered subscription access and a payment gateway, to ensure PRISM's long-term viability beyond the ADB-funded period. We are also conducting on-site audits of selected utilities' data acquisition and reporting systems, delivering tailored training and detailed audit reports with actionable recommendations for each.