The sheer scale of the likely Russian offensive against Ukraine’s vital infrastructure means Kyiv cannot simply focus on the repair of damaged power plants and transmission lines. It won’t work. Instead, it must build an energy system that can function when the national grid is damaged or disconnected.
And that is pushing Ukraine towards smaller, more dispersed sources of electricity and heat, supported by batteries, backup generation, and local energy networks.
While a single large power facility can be destroyed or disabled, a network of smaller facilities is harder to knock out completely. It may not replace the national grid, but it can keep hospitals, water utilities, schools, transport systems and residential areas functioning.
The coming winter will test how far the transition has progressed.
The country’s electricity system is still heavily dependent on large-scale generation, with nuclear power as the backbone, complemented by thermal, hydro and renewable generation, and a high-voltage national network to distribute it to consumers.
But Russian attacks on energy infrastructure, including substations critical to nuclear safety, have exposed the vulnerability of this model and driven the need for change.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned that Moscow’s strategy has created regional differences in electricity availability. Western areas can access imports while communities closer to the front line face much greater shortages.
Rebuilding every damaged large facility exactly as it was before the war may temporarily restore capacity, but it does not make it more resilient to the next wave of attacks. That is especially the case when Russia is raising production of ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones, and when Ukraine desperately lacks interceptor missiles.
Kyiv’s response is to build “energy hundreds,” a network of smaller generating facilities capable of operating autonomously. Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said at the end of August that 1.8 GW of distributed gas generation was already operating, along with 1GW of energy storage, while another 800 MW of generation across 280 facilities is targeted for completion by the end of this year. (That’s significant, although total national power consumption in mid-winter is around 18GW, suggesting that ambition may be qualified by scale.)
The most important test of this decentralized approach will be in individual cities, including Kyiv.
The capital’s energy infrastructure has been repeatedly attacked, and last winter thousands of homes, schools and hospitals were left without heat as temperatures plunged.
European Union-backed financing is supporting containerized co-generation across Kyiv. The gas-fired units, which produce both electricity and heat, will be scattered around the capital, allowing heating systems to continue operating even when there are national grid outages.
In a normal energy system, co-generation is primarily installed for efficiency, but in a war zone it provides resilience by ensuring critical services keep operating without relying on power from the centralized national electricity system.
The city is working toward 200 MW of additional autonomous power for municipal services and transport, and the distribution of the facilities matters almost as much as their total capacity.
In August, ministers said communities would connect 75 existing cogeneration plants across the country, with nearly 100 MW of electricity-generation capacity and 107 MW of heating capacity. The government allocated 732.5m hryvnia ($16.4m) for their installation and connection while also giving funding for modular boiler houses.
Communities do not necessarily have to be energy independent, but need enough local capacity to maintain essential services when the wider system is disrupted. Ukraine still needs its large nuclear plants, transmission infrastructure, cross-border connections for imports and national balancing mechanisms.
But the new model is layered, and every level is a vital component. Large national generation contributes alongside regional and municipal generation, storage, backup systems and, where possible, microgrids.
Gas generators can produce electricity, but need fuel; solar panels produce power, but only when conditions allow, and wind generation is variable. Resilient local systems therefore need storage and the ability to balance supply and demand.
In September, the US International Development Finance Corporation approved a $97m loan to DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, to expand battery-storage capacity. The company has already deployed six battery systems in Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk, with total storage capacity of 400 MWh.
The government has also announced the delivery of large storage systems to six regions, and international assistance continues to supply transformers, generators and other critical equipment.
While storage cannot prevent a missile or drone from destroying a power plant, it can give a local system flexibility after an attack by helping to bridge short periods of disruption, stabilizing local networks and reducing pressure on the wider grid.
The government has set ambitious targets for the new model, and regional authorities have been instructed to complete key winter-preparation work by October 1. By August 12, Ukraine had secured 918.5 MW of the 1,214.6 MW of identified backup-power needs for heating and water infrastructure, about 75% of its goal.
A July assessment by the Razumkov Centre said state and local budgets had allocated substantially less than the 27bn hryvnia needed for comprehensive resilience and warned some projects would not be ready in time.
Public expectations are harder to measure. Ukrainians have learned to prepare for power cuts, and portable power stations, generators, batteries, gas burners, and firewood have become part of household planning, but personal resilience has limits.
Some households have backup batteries, fuel, and food supplies, but others cannot afford them and instead rely on relatives outside the urban areas, or the possibility of temporarily relocating.
Hospitals need power for medical equipment, water utilities need electricity to pump and treat water, heating systems need electricity to operate pumps and controls, and telecommunications infrastructure needs backup power.
The resilience of a city depends on whether these critical systems can continue operating when the national grid is under stress, and Ukraine is conducting a large-scale experiment under wartime conditions.
The IEA has already identified Ukraine’s experience as a lesson for the rest of the world. Protecting critical infrastructure against physical attack while maintaining reliable energy supplies is increasingly relevant to other countries facing extreme weather, cyberattacks, and other threats to centralized infrastructure.
What is needed is a grid less liable to fail all at once, and that may be the most important lesson of Ukraine’s wartime energy transformation. Resilience does not mean building a system that cannot be attacked; it means building a network that can still function afterwards.
Kateryna Odarchenko is a political consultant, a partner of the SIC Group Ukraine, and president of the PolitA Institute for Democracy and Development. A specialist practicing in the field of political communication and projects, she has practical experience in the implementation of all-Ukrainian political campaigns and party-building.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
