Expect ‘years’ of power outages – Ukrainian PM
All Ukrainians will have to get used to conserving electricity, due to the long-term damage inflicted on power plants by Russian airstrikes, Prime Minister Denis Shmygal has said.
Moscow has resumed bomb and missile strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure in recent months, with the Russian Defense Ministry calling it a response to Kiev’s attempts to target Russian oil depots and refineries.
“Our goal is to save at all levels: from large enterprises to individual houses and apartments,” Shmygal said at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday. “Saving will be part of our daily life in the coming years.”
According to Shmygal, Ukraine has lost an estimated 9.2 gigawatts of generation capacity so far and the damage will take years to repair at best.
Ukraine is hoping to deal with the problem by importing more electricity from the EU, building up air defenses to protect the remaining facilities, and decentralizing power generation, he said.
The government in Kiev is considering lifting the customs and bureaucratic barriers for the import of generators, solar panels, capacitors and converters, Shmygal said. There are also plans to offer loans to citizens who install their own power generation units.
Each region of Ukraine needs to be able to power critical infrastructure, the prime minister noted, suggesting “dozens of mini thermal power plants” as a possible solution to this. Estonia intends to send Ukraine a 200 megawatt TPP, he also revealed.
Last, but not least, Kiev intends to expand imports of electricity from the EU, from the current 1.7 gigawatt-hours (GWh) to 2.2 GWh.
Russia first targeted Ukraine’s electrical generation capabilities in October 2022, following a suicide bombing of the Kerch Bridge to Crimea that the Ukrainian intelligence later took credit for. The air and drone strikes resumed in March this year, striking generation and distribution facilities across the country and leaving entire regions without power.
Estimates of the damage have varied. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba said last month that Russian strikes had damaged half of the power grid. Meanwhile, former infrastructure minister Aleksey Kucherenko said that about 90% of power generation capacity had been taken out. Only the nuclear power plants in the territory controlled by Kiev have remained unscathed.
