The American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan released its 2025 Taiwan White Paper today, emphasizing the critical importance of infrastructure resilience. The Chamber urges the government to prioritize the modernization of power grid facilities, particularly in expanding investments in energy storage systems and renewable energy integration.

The Chamber noted that investments in energy, healthcare, and digital infrastructure continue to face challenges, with stable, reliable, and clean energy supply being key to attracting foreign investment in Taiwan. Strengthening the resilience of critical infrastructure is essential for ensuring Taiwan's economic security, technological leadership, and social stability, prompting the Chamber to call for more forward-looking and coordinated strategies to enhance the overall effectiveness of digital, energy, and communication infrastructure.

In terms of energy, the Chamber emphasizes the need for prioritizing power grid modernization, particularly through increasing investments in energy storage systems, demand response technologies, and renewable energy integration. The Chamber also indicated that the promotion of renewable energy remains curtailed by grid congestion and uncertainty regarding interconnection capacities, leading to delays in multiple development projects.

Moreover, the market for battery energy storage systems (BESS), which was initially seen as a key solution to enhancing energy resilience, faces challenges in price volatility and uncertain investment signals. In response, the Chamber suggests that the Ministry of Economic Affairs establish a more transparent and predictable market participation framework to stabilize the investment environment, including setting specific timelines, establishing benchmark pricing mechanisms, and reforming bidding designs.

Regarding digital infrastructure, the Chamber points out that data centers and cloud service providers are the core engines driving Taiwan's AI transformation. The Chamber supports implementing performance-oriented energy standards that allow operators to select the most cost-effective and innovative operational models based on their own circumstances, thereby enhancing energy efficiency and maintaining investment incentives. To ensure national asset security and digital sovereignty, the Chamber recommends adopting internationally recognized security frameworks, such as zero-trust architectures, and formulating more consistent cloud procurement policies.

On communication infrastructure, the Chamber stresses the need for simultaneous improvements, urging the government to procure dedicated repair vessels for undersea cables to respond to increasingly frequent disruptions. The Chamber proposes implementing an integrated, developable, and highly anticipatory infrastructure system to address long-term trends and enhance resilience against sudden impacts, suggesting that the Executive Yuan establish a cross-ministerial task force dedicated to identifying current construction bottlenecks and streamlining planning and procurement processes.