With Russia intensifying airstrikes on Ukraine’s power grid over the past month, darkness once again engulfs Ukrainian cities at night. In Kyiv, residents rely on cellphone flashlights to navigate unlit streets. To walk their dogs, they use glow sticks doubling as makeshift collars.
Ukraine has so far weathered the effects of three major Russian strikes over the past month by cutting street lighting and imposing intermittent shutdowns to ease pressure on the power grid. But two years of attacks on power plants and substations have left the country’s energy network on the verge of collapse, experts say.
The United Nations has warned that power outages could last up to 18 hours a day this winter, “leaving civilians without the electricity they need to power homes, run water pumps and allow children to study online.”
That has forced the Ukrainian authorities to turn to unconventional measures to try to avert an energy crisis. It is bringing an entire aging Lithuanian power plant to Ukraine to scavenge parts for the damaged grid; has moved to lease floating power plants from Turkey; and has even requested a U.N. presence at critical substations, hoping to deter Russian attacks.
“We are doing everything possible,” Viktoriya Hryb, the head of the Ukrainian Parliament’s subcommittee on energy security, said in a recent interview in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.
Still, Ms. Hryb and other Ukrainian officials admitted that these measures would not be enough to prevent blackouts. In some cases, they may not even be ready before year’s end, when subzero temperatures drive up electricity consumption.
Here’s a closer look at Ukraine’s efforts to keep the lights on, and the challenges it faces.
Scavenging for parts
Months of Russian attacks have depleted Ukraine’s stockpiles of equipment to repair and maintain power plants.
Because Ukraine’s energy facilities were mostly built when it was part of the Soviet Union, they are reliant on spare parts from Soviet-era facilities, said Andrian Prokip, a Kyiv-based energy expert with the Kennan Institute in Washington.
So last year, DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, began hunting through plants in former Eastern Bloc countries like Slovakia and the Czech Republic to find compatible parts. “We found power plants using generators and turbines that were pretty much like ours,” said Oleksiy Povolotskiy, the head of DTEK’s recovery office.
In one of Ukraine’s boldest projects, an entire power plant that once supplied heat to half of Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, is being disassembled with support from the European Union and its parts used to repair a few damaged Ukrainian facilities.
The operation began this summer and is continuing, according to Ignitis, the Lithuanian energy company that owns the plant. More than 300 pieces of equipment are being shipped to Ukraine, their exact destination kept secret for security reasons.
The plant’s spare parts were originally scheduled to arrive in Ukraine before winter, but logistical obstacles and bureaucratic delays have pushed back the timeline, and some key equipment will not be delivered until next year, according to officials and business people involved in the operation, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of its sensitive nature.
Renting floating power plants
Building new power plants is a lengthy process that Ukraine cannot afford as winter sets in. As an alternative, the country plans to rent “powerships” — floating plants mounted on cargo ships — to supply electricity to the Black Sea coastal region of Odesa, which lacks power generation facilities.
The powerships, running on fuel or gas, will be moored in the region’s ports and will transmit electricity to the grid via onshore substations.
Ukrainian officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the plan’s sensitivity, said they were in talks with Karpowership, a Turkish company specializing in powerships, to rent several vessels. Last year, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with a state-owned Ukrainian energy trader to install powerships capable of generating 500 megawatts per hour, enough electricity to supply one million Ukrainians.
Karpowership did not respond to requests for comment.
The plans have accelerated in recent weeks, with the government issuing a decree permitting the installation of gas pistons and turbines on ships to power the floating plants. Ukrenergo, the national electricity operator, said this fall that it had begun building transmission facilities to link the ships to the grid. A Ukrainian official said the facilities were now completed.
Ms. Hryb said two powerships might be operational within weeks if Ukraine could overcome two challenges.
The Ukrainian government is trying to get its Western partners to pay part of the cost of generating electricity on the ships, which Ms. Hryb and Mr. Prokip said is very high. Another issue is ensuring the ships’ safety in the Odesa region, an area frequently bombed by Russia.
Mr. Prokip said there was hope that the ships might be spared because they are operated by Turkey, a country that has mediated agreements between Russia and Ukraine during the war.
Stationing U.N. experts at critical substations
With most of its thermal and hydroelectric power plants destroyed or badly damaged, Ukraine has relied on its three operational nuclear power stations to keep the lights on. Together, they can provide 7.7 gigawatts of electricity per hour, more than half of the country’s current generation capacity, according to DiXi Group, a Ukrainian energy think tank.
Russia has refrained from attacking the nuclear plants directly, which could trigger a catastrophic disaster. Instead, it has recently focused on crippling their ability to transmit power by destroying the substations connecting them to the grid.
Since August, the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. body, has recorded four attacks on such substations. Each time, the strikes forced several reactors offline or required them to reduce output as a precautionary measure.
Ukraine has built concrete shelters around the substations to protect them, but officials admit that they are ineffective against missiles. So they have turned to a drastic measure: asking officials from the U.N. agency to stay at the substations, banking on their presence to deter Russian attacks.
Moscow might be reluctant to risk the lives of the agency’s staff because it depends on its support for its nuclear program exports, said Jan Vande Putte, a nuclear expert at Greenpeace.
In September, Ukraine’s parliamentary energy committee sent a letter to the agency that was reviewed by The New York Times, urging it to station “a permanent monitoring group” at critical substations to “prevent possible provocations” by Russia. The next month, Yuliia Kyian, a top official at the Energy Ministry, said Ukraine was negotiating with the agency to arrange such oversight.
So far, the International Atomic Energy Agency has agreed to conduct periodic monitoring missions at critical substations but not to station agents there permanently, Greenpeace said.
The agency reported that one of its vehicles was hit by a drone while en route to inspect a Russian-controlled nuclear plant in southern Ukraine last week. The agency did not specify which side launched the drone, and both Russia and Ukraine traded blame. Mr. Vande Putte said the attack appeared to be a deliberate Russian attempt to intimidate the agency.
Ms. Hryb conceded that International Atomic Energy Agency agents would risk their lives by staying at the substations. “But who in Ukraine doesn’t today?” she asked.
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