War is speeding Ukraine’s green energy shift: CEO
By Sophie ESTIENNE
Davos, Switzerland (AFP) Jan 23, 2025
Russia’s invasion is forcing Ukraine to speed up its green energy transition as a way to secure its electricity supply and infrastructure against attacks, the head of Ukraine’s biggest private electricity provider said.
“Building wind farms or solar farms is not only about decarbonisation. It’s about also energy security and resilience,” Maxim Timchenko, chief executive of DTEK, told AFP at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday.
“It’s much harder to hit and switch off these power stations than thermal or hydro,” he said.
Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s energy system as part of its nearly three-year war waged on its neighbour.
Timchenko announced at the Davos gathering what he called the biggest private investment in Ukraine since Moscow launched its invasion in 2022: A 450 million euro ($468 million) deal to buy 64 wind turbines from Denmark’s Vestas.
The turbines will expand DTEK’s Tyligulska wind farm on the Black Sea coast.
Turbines also offer the advantage of coming online rapidly and progressively as they are installed, with some of the new ones from Vestas churning out power as soon as this year.
“I hope that by, before next winter we will add already 60 megawatts of capacity with this program,” with full capacity of 500 megawatts at Tyligulska reached by the end of 2026.
That would be enough to supply around 900,000 homes, he said.
– ‘More resilient’ –
The project underscores Ukraine’s push to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels or nuclear energy to operate huge power plants for an extensive grid, which are both particularly exposed to Russian airstrikes.
The country’s infrastructure has often been targeted and crippled, leading to blackouts or emergency voltage reductions — so-called “brownouts” — that are especially painful during the winter.
“This transition from… a highly centralised, highly vulnerable energy system to clean, decentralised, more resilient, and new in terms of technology system… this transition is accelerated by the war,” Timchenko said.
DTEK also announced two weeks ago a deal with a German-American group Fluence to build what Timchenko called the first industrial-scale battery storage project in Ukraine.
That project is targeted for October, and the company is in talks with potential partners for two other wind parks.
The hope is that smaller renewable energy sites spread across the country will reduce the system’s vulnerability as well as emissions.
And an attack would have to destroy all of a wind farm’s turbines to completely shut it down.
Wind and solar currently generate 10 percent of Ukraine’s needs and coal or gas-fired plants produce 20 percent, with nuclear plants the main provider at 55 percent.
“These investments make us more resilient. We feel much more confident that the Russians will not destroy this new power station in such extent that they can do it withe thermals,” Timchenko said of the Tyligulska expansion.
“Basically all our power stations were attacked for several times during 2024,” he noted, with substations and transmission lines also targeted.
Nonetheless he said DTEK had managed to recover much of the lost capacity, and currently 50 to 60 percent is operational.
“Taking into account that we have a drop of consumption since the beginning of the war, this capacity together with support of imports of power is enough to avoid any blackouts,” Timchenko said.
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