Buying or selling: what is really happening with Ukrainian electricity?

Ukraine’s place in the European energy system

As German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said during the Recovery Conference in Berlin, Ukraine will be part of the European energy system as early as 2022.

“Since we connected our grids in March 2022, Ukraine has been exporting surplus electricity to the EU and thus contributing to our energy security,” he said,

– scholz said.

Indeed, almost since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has disconnected from the Russian energy system and joined the European one. We are currently working in parallel with European countries – the ENTSO-E association (European Energy System).

“How does this mechanism work? We can have flows both in our direction and in the direction of Europe. As a rule, in our situation, we now receive very large technical flows, because our system is not balanced. In order for Ukraine not to pay a lot of money, the power industry at night, when there is no consumption, instead of switching off the power unit, produces some surplus and returns what they have taken to Europe back,”

– he told journalists Ivan Plachkov, former Minister of Energy.

At the same time, as Oleh Popenko, head of the Union of Consumers of Public Utilities and an expert in the housing and utilities sector, explained, technical overflow is not an export of electricity to the EU.

“If we calculate how much we took and how much we took away in terms of electricity flows, we get zero on average. Therefore, it is difficult to call it export. Because we get the same electricity back from the other side or at a different time. Therefore, today, for a specialist, there is no export. There are technical flows: we send it there, and they send it back,”

– popenko explained.

What is a technical flow?

“Electricity has the following feature: we consume as much as we want and when we want, and power engineers must produce as much electricity as we want to match it. Because there is no electricity in warehouses, you know? For example, if a power unit fails, we need compensation right away. And automatically, without any human intervention, there is a so-called technical flow from another country to us in order to balance the energy system,”

– ivan Plachkov explained this term.

Is it possible for Ukraine to “survive” without electricity flows?

According to Oleg Popenko, technical electricity flows support the operation of the entire Ukrainian energy system

“These flows support the operation of our power system, because electricity is a moving process, not a sustainable one. You can’t just say, ‘That’s it, we’re going to stop the electricity supply, once or twice, and close the export tap. It doesn’t work that way,”

– he said.

According to Popenko, the last large volume of real electricity exports took place on 1 March, before the shelling and destruction that took place on 9 March – the first stage of the destruction of shunting generation.