Ukraine grid on brink of collapse despite surge in EU support

Electricity imports from Europe are on the rise but Ukraine’s grid looks to be increasingly fragile after years of Russian bombing.

A cascading blackout across western and central Ukraine that brought the Kyiv metro to a halt and exposed residents to sub-zero temperatures tells the story of a power system on the brink of collapse.

It wasn’t Russian strikes or a rumoured cyber attack that caused the grid collapse, but rather ice build-up on a high-voltage overhead cable, which disrupted the carefully balanced network of power lines in southern Ukraine.

“This caused a cascade shutdown in the power grid,” said Denys Shmyhal, deputy PM and energy minister. 

Ice build-up on cables is not rare in Ukraine or Moldova, where winters, as now, are often bitingly cold.

Failing to cope with such routine challenges reflects how depleted Ukrenergo, the country’s grid operator, is after almost four years under constant attack.

Ukraine says Russia fired “more than 6,000 attack drones, around 5,500 guided aerial bombs, and 158 missiles of various types” at infrastructure in January alone.

A second front line

For Ukraine’s exhausted electrical engineers, the power grid is another front line in the war, and like combat soldiers, sometimes they don’t return home – either due to technical mishaps or deliberate hit by follow-up strikes by Russian artillery.

Ukrenergo’s former chair, Alexei Brecht, was electrocuted at a substation he was helping to repair in late January. On Sunday, a Russian drone hit a bus carrying miners, killing 12, highlighting the danger faced by essential workers of all kinds.

“The system is really at its limit,” said Rouven Stubbe of the think tank Green Deal Ukraina. Only with enormous effort have Ukrenergo and the wider energy sector been able to keep the grid running. 

“If Russia continues like this, incidents such as the Moldova-Romania-Ukraine blackout cascade could become more frequent,” he added. “That was really almost the worst-case scenario and shows that the Ukrainian system is becoming increasingly fragile.”

At worst, Ukraine could suffer a country-wide blackout like the unprecedented grid collapse on the Iberian Peninsula last April, he cautioned. 

As part of its effort to keep the lights on, the war-torn country has been leaning increasingly heavily on the EU for electricity imports, frequently exceeding past technical limits. And yet it is falling far short of making full use of the available interconnection capacity with the bloc.

East of the Dnieper

Alongside strikes on the grid, Russia has doubled down on targeting so-called ‘combined heat and power’ plants (CHPs) – facilities that produce both electricity and heat, which in Eastern Europe is commonly piped into thousands of homes in housing estates and tower blocks.

Kyiv permanently lost one of its CHPs in January, leaving thousands of households without heat for weeks. Other towns east of the Dnieper River face similar problems: Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, Sumy and Kharkiv all struggle to keep homes warm amid repeated strikes on heating infrastructure.

European allies, notably Germany, have rushed to plug the gap, donating two power stations to Kyiv only last week. 

“With the two combined heat and power plants from Germany, we supply 86,000 people, five hospitals, 25 kindergartens, 13 schools, and almost 200 administrative buildings with electricity and heat,” said Reem Alabali Radovan, Germany’s development minister. The two plants have a total capacity of 3.7 megawatts, Germany’s development agency GIZ told Euractiv.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said “another 41 co-generation units with a total capacity of 40.8 MW and 76 modular boiler units will arrive in Ukraine soon.”

Source: https://www.euractiv.com/news/ukraine-grid-on-brink-of-collapse-despite-surge-in-eu-support/