Floating power plants and the “Soviet legacy”: Ukraine is looking for unconventional ways to restore energy
24 December 2024 08:58
Ukraine’s power grid has been so damaged by Russian attacks that officials are looking for new ways to avert a crisis, such as renting floating power plants and removing old Soviet-era power plants from the former Eastern Bloc countries. This is stated in the material of The New York Times, "Komersant Ukrainian" informs.
“Two years of attacks on power plants and substations have brought the country’s power grid to the brink of collapse, experts say. The United Nations has warned that power outages in Ukraine could last up to 18 hours a day this winter,” the article says.
This forced the Ukrainian authorities to resort to unconventional measures to avoid an energy crisis.
“It is transporting an old Lithuanian power plant to Ukraine to assemble parts for the damaged grid; it has moved to leasing floating power plants from Turkey; and it has even requested a UN presence at critical substations in hopes of deterring Russian attacks,” the article notes.
“We are doing everything we can,” said Victoria Gryb, chairwoman of the Verkhovna Rada subcommittee on energy security, in a recent interview.
Hryb and other Ukrainian officials have acknowledged that these measures are not enough to prevent blackouts. In some cases, they may not even be ready by the end of the year, when sub-zero temperatures increase electricity consumption.
Search for spare parts
Months of Russian attacks have depleted Ukraine’s stockpile of equipment for repairing and maintaining power plants.
Because Ukraine’s energy facilities were largely built when it was part of the Soviet Union, they depend on Soviet-era spare parts, said Andrian Prokip, a Kyiv-based energy expert at the Kennan Institute in Washington.
So last year, DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, began searching factories in former Eastern Bloc countries such as Slovakia and the Czech Republic to find compatible parts.
“We found power plants with generators and turbines that were very similar to ours,” said Oleksiy Povolotskiy, head of DTEK’s recovery department.
In one of Ukraine’s boldest projects, an entire power plant that once supplied heat to half of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, is being dismantled with the support of the European Union and its parts are being used to repair several damaged Ukrainian facilities.
According to Ignitis, the Lithuanian energy company that owns the plant, the work began this summer and is ongoing. More than 300 pieces of equipment are being sent to Ukraine, the exact purpose of which is being kept secret for security reasons.
Initially, it was planned that the spare parts for the plant would arrive in Ukraine by winter, but logistical obstacles and bureaucratic delays have pushed back the deadline, and some key equipment will not be delivered until next year.
Lease of floating power plants
The construction of new power plants is a lengthy process that Ukraine cannot afford with the onset of winter. As an alternative, the country plans to lease “power plants” – floating stations mounted on cargo ships – to provide electricity to the Black Sea coast of Odesa region, which lacks power generation capacity.
The fuel- or gas-powered ships will be docked in the region’s ports and will transmit electricity to the grid via land-based substations.
Ukrainian officials, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the plan, said they are in talks with Karpowership, a Turkish company specializing in motorized vessels, to lease several ships. Last year, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with Ukraine’s state-owned energy trader to install power plants capable of generating 500 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply one million Ukrainians.
Karpowership did not respond to requests for comment.
Plans accelerated in recent weeks when the government issued a decree allowing the installation of gas pistons and turbines on ships to power floating plants. Ukrenergo, the national electricity operator, said this fall that it had started construction of power transmission facilities to connect the ships to the grid. A Ukrainian official said the facilities are now complete.
Hryb said the two power ships could be operational within weeks if Ukraine can 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 Hryb and Prokip called very high. The other issue is ensuring the safety of the ships in the Odesa region, where Russia often bombs.
Prokip said that there is hope that the ships can be saved because they are operated by Turkey, a country that brokered deals between Russia and Ukraine during the war.
Deployment of UN experts at critical substations
With most of its thermal and hydroelectric power plants destroyed or severely damaged, Ukraine relies on its three operating nuclear power plants to keep the lights on. Together, they can provide 7.7 gigawatts of electricity, more than half of the country’s current capacity, reports DiXi Group, a Ukrainian energy think tank.
Russia has refrained from a direct attack on the nuclear plants, which could have triggered a catastrophe. Instead, it has recently focused on damaging their ability to transmit electricity by destroying the substations that connect them to the grid.
Since August, the International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN body, has recorded four attacks on such substations. Each time, the Russian strikes forced several reactors to shut down or required them to reduce production as a precautionary measure.
Ukraine has built concrete shelters around the substations to protect them, but officials recognize that they are ineffective against missiles. So they have taken a radical measure: they have asked UN agency representatives to stay at the substations, counting on their presence to deter Russian attacks.
Moscow may not be willing to risk the lives of the agency’s staff because it depends on their support for the export of its nuclear program, said Jan Vande Putte, a nuclear expert at Greenpeace.
In September, Ukraine’s parliamentary energy committee sent a letter to the agency, seen by The New York Times, calling for a “permanent monitoring group” to be deployed at critical substations to “prevent possible provocations” by Russia. The following month, Yulia Kiyan, head of the Energy Ministry, said that Ukraine was negotiating with the agency to organize such oversight.
For now, the International Atomic Energy Agency has agreed to conduct periodic monitoring missions at critical substations, but not to deploy agents there permanently, Greenpeace said.
