By Chethana Janith, Jadetimes News
On a tour of a destroyed power plant, unidentified for security reasons, the monumental damage wrought by Russia’s spring campaign against Ukraine’s electricity generation infrastructure is clear. The vast Soviet era, coal fired power station is gutted, walls charred by a fire that that burnt for over 24 hours, windows blown out, roof collapsed, machinery wrecked, pipes and ducts broken; everywhere a mess of rubble, twisted metal support struts, flayed steel cables, wire.
Serhiy (who asked that his surname not be used), a senior engineer, puts his finger in the shrapnel holes in the 20mm thick hulls of the turbines, to illustrate the force of the blast. Incredibly, there were no casualties among the 15 or so key staff that are required to remain on site during air raid alerts, hunkered behind sandbags in control rooms in the centre of the plant. Rain falls into pools of light from the holes in the shredded roof. It is unnaturally quiet.
Maxim Timchenko, CEO of DTEK, which runs most of Ukraine’s non nuclear power plants, including the one The Economist visited, says that 90% of their generating capacity has been destroyed this year. Waves of attacks since March have targeted thermal and hydro plants as well as, for the first time, solar energy installations. As Russia struggles to make any serious gains on the battlefield, power lines have become the new front line.
Before the invasion, Ukraine’s generating capacity was 36 gigawatts (GW) of electricity. Russia targeted its electricity infrastructure in late 2022, and half of that capacity had already been lost—either occupied, destroyed or damaged, before the attacks renewed this year. Ukraine had managed to restore some capacity, and last winter managed to just about keep the lights on, restoring capacity almost to the 18gw then needed.
But this year’s attacks have destroyed 9gw of capacity. Pretty much all that is left comes from nuclear power stations, which the Russians have refrained from attacking. The chug of generators has returned to Kyiv’s streets and there are power cuts in every Ukrainian city. Russian attacks continue. There are not enough air defence batteries to knock out all the missiles.
Now what? Ukraine currently imports 1.7gw from the eu; this could be increased to around 2gw or so, according to more optimistic predictions, but transmission constraints mean imported electricity cannot provide more than an incremental boost. In the short term there is some hope that the damaged power stations can be repaired sufficiently by this winter to produce another 2-3GW of capacity. Ukrainian engineers are scouring Europe for second hand equipment from decommissioned Soviet type power stations.
It is unclear how realistic this is. “We will try,” says Serhiy, the engineer, sadly surveying the wreckage of his power station. But everyone understands, that even if you could partly refurbish existing power plants, they are large sitting ducks. All of them have already been hit multiple times.
Repairing existing thermal power stations could be a relatively cheap stop gap measure. But even without the war, Ukraine would need to reorient its energy policy away from coal fired stations. The government has decided to invest in nuclear; announcing that four new reactors are to be built at Khmelnytsky, one of the three nuclear power plants still under Ukrainian control, and which produce most of the power Ukraine still has. (The fourth, at Zaporizhia, is under Russian occupation and is now shut down.) Ukrainian energy analysts are not convinced. “They are spending money on something we don’t need,” says Volodymyr Omelchenko at the Razumkov Centre, a think tank. “It’s a very bad decision in my opinion. It looks like a way to tie up a lot of money in investing in a project over ten years.”
Meanwhile local municipalities, desperate to be able to provide the critical services of heating and water pumping this winter, are decentralising power generation, installing mini power plants in the form of modern, efficient, gas turbines that have a capacity of anything from five to 70 megawatts (MW). These mini power plants can plug in locally, but it is unlikely that enough could be installed before the coming winter to help with the nationwide structural power deficit. Wind and solar can add a bit more.
“The irony of this destruction and this war is that it accelerated the decarbonisation of the energy industry of Ukraine,” says Mr. Timchenko. DTEK finished building a 114MW wind farm just 100km from the front line last year. When a Russian missile hit one of their solar panel fields, they repaired the damage in just four days. Wind and solar are not just greener options, they are strategically resilient. “It’s only one missile to destroy a 300MW coal fired power station,” points out Mr. Timchenko. “But they need 50 missiles to destroy the same capacity in a wind farm.”
Whatever new projects come online, Ukraine urgently needs more power this winter, just a few months away. There is too little time and too few of the billions of dollars needed to install several hundred small power plants, renovate bombed out power stations or build wind and solar farms. Rolling blackouts will be routine.
Ukrainians have already learned how to adapt to electricity shortages. Small businesses have diesel generators. Medium sized factories have invested in gas turbines and can even sell their extra supply to the national grid. Cafés are open for co working. All buildings have generators to power lifts. People buy battery cells they can charge and use at home for Wi Fi connections and USB lamps. But all this will be sorely tested.
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