Providing power to millions of customers in Ukraine during the Russian invasion is challenging to say the least. Especially when the power grid itself becomes a target.
“What we are seeing now is that they are attacking transmission lines, substations and power plants,” said Maxim Timchenko, CEO of DTEK, a large private Ukrainian energy company. In the early days of the war, he said, the Russian military seemed wary of demolishing critical civilian infrastructure.
Now, he said, “they are no longer selective.”
In a video call from an undisclosed location in western Ukraine, Mr. Timchenko explained how DTEK, which supplies about 20 percent of Ukraine’s electricity, and other Ukrainian utilities scrambled to keep the lights on during the Russian attack.
Amid the urgency, Ukraine, which is not a member of the European Union, has also managed in a matter of weeks to achieve something it had been working on for years: a connection to the electricity grids of neighboring EU Member States, including, according to mr. Timchenko, Romania, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary.
“This will help Ukraine keep its electricity system stable, keep homes warm and lights on in these dark times,” European Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson said in a statement. “In this area, Ukraine is now part of Europe,” she added.
In the event of a major outage in its electricity system, Ukraine could now request an emergency power supply from the European system, Mr Timchenko said. Ukraine also cut its electricity connections with Russia and Belarus just before the invasion to gain independence from the power sources in hostile countries.
When transmission lines are damaged or cut, DTEK arranges for Ukrainian soldiers to accompany emergency repair teams, dressed in body armor, to reach the affected sites. Mr. Timchenko said that six of DTEK’s approximately 60,000 employees had died during the war, although not while performing duties for the company.
Overall, Mr Timchenko said, electricity activities in Ukraine were “relatively stable”. However, it seems weak to keep things that way. Most of the electricity for Ukraine’s households comes from four nuclear power plants, and the one in Zaporizhzhya, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, is now occupied by Russian troops after coming under fire.
So far, he said, electricity consumption has fallen by about a third from before the Feb. 24 invasion. This is due to a decline in economic activity and damage that cannot be repaired in the short term in places such as Mariupol, the city on the Black Sea coast that has been heavily bombed by Russia, and Kharkiv, the second largest city, which also has suffered damage. Mr. Timchenko estimates that 1.3 million customers in Ukraine have in fact been shut down.
In Luhansk, one of DTEK’s eight conventional power plants that burn fossil fuels has been decoupled due to the invasion, and he is concerned about another unit located near Russian lines that could be cut off on an advance. DTEK had also switched some generating units to natural gas when supplies of coal the company mines were blocked.
Mr Timchenko said only about a third of the company’s 3.8 million customers are now paying their bills, although the banking system continues to function. He said the company — ultimately owned by Rinat Akhmetov, often described as Ukraine’s richest person — still has cash reserves. But he said the state-owned electric utilities urgently needed an injection of international aid.
