Skyscrapers are left without electricity for up to 12 hours a day. The neighborhoods are filled with the roar of gas generators installed in cafes and restaurants. And at night, the streets are plunged into darkness due to lack of lighting.
That’s the new reality in Ukraine, where the arrival of summer has not offered a respite for the country’s power grid, but has instead brought a return to the kind of energy crisis experienced during its first winter at war, a year and a half ago.
In recent months, Russian missile and drone attacks against Ukraine’s power plants and substations have left the country’s energy infrastructure severely affected. To make matters worse, two nuclear power plant units are scheduled to be repaired this week, and summer temperatures are expected to prompt people to turn on their air conditioners.
As a result, Ukrainian authorities have ordered rolling blackouts across the country for this week, a more aggressive measure than the regional and irregular power outages that some parts of the country had been experiencing earlier this spring.
Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, head of Ukraine’s national electricity operator Ukrenergo, said on Sunday that the power shortage facing the country this week would be “of quite serious volume.”
Ukrenergo said emergency blackouts were implemented in seven of Ukraine’s 24 regions on Tuesday.
While power outages in the summer can leave people uncomfortably hot in dark apartments, they pose a deadlier risk in the winter.
And widespread blackouts in Ukraine have already raised concerns about what will happen when freezing weather hits, when the use of heating devices increases the load on the energy system. Experts have warned that power plants have suffered too much damage to be repaired before freezing temperatures arrive around December, which could plunge many people into dangerously cold living conditions.
“The situation is even worse than last year,” Olena Lapenko, an energy security expert at DiXi Group, a Ukrainian think tank, said in an interview on Monday, referring to the winter of 2022-2023 during which Russia hit energy. from Ukraine. infrastructure.
Lapenko estimated that even with moderate temperatures and no new Russian attacks on the power grid, Ukraine would be 1.3 gigawatts short during peak consumption hours this summer. This represents approximately one tenth of the energy consumption during peak hours.
“Can you imagine what’s going to happen in the winter?” Mrs. Lapenko asked.
Russia has attacked Ukraine’s energy infrastructure before. From October 2022 to March 2023, Moscow attacked it with missiles, knocking out half of the country’s power grid in November 2022. Residents of kyiv, the capital, sometimes had to rely on flashlights at night and planned a possible evacuation of the city.
Ukraine survived the attacks thanks to newly delivered Western air defense systems and the non-stop work of engineers to repair vital equipment.
But Russia’s latest campaign against the power grid, which began in late March, has been more devastating than before because Moscow has upped its tactics, firing volleys of larger, more complex missiles than Ukraine’s limited air defenses have struggled to intercept.
Energy experts estimate that Ukraine has lost about half of its electricity generating capacity since the start of the war. Most of the country’s thermal and hydroelectric power plants have been destroyed, posing a major problem because they provide the additional generating capacity needed to meet demand during peak consumption periods.
Olha Buslavets, Ukraine’s former energy minister, said last week that Ukraine is now essentially dependent on its nuclear power plants, which supply most of the country’s electricity but cannot meet peak demand.
DiXi Group says there is not enough time to rebuild enough generating capacity before winter hits. Olena Pavlenko, head of the think tank, said Ukraine needed spare equipment, such as transformers, to rebuild substations. kyiv hopes to be able to obtain spare parts from decommissioned thermal power plants in Germany, Pavlenko said.
One way to help address the problem, Pavlenko added, would be for authorities to install mobile gas turbine power plants across the country. But that option could take up to a year.
Ukraine, normally a net exporter of electricity, is now importing record amounts from its neighbors, including Romania, Slovakia and Poland. But Kudrytskyi, head of Ukrenergo, said imports are insufficient to offset energy losses.
That has led Ukrainian authorities to impose scheduled blackouts across the country to try to stabilize the grid. DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private power company, has posted schedules online to inform consumers when power will be cut to their homes, although additional emergency outages are sometimes required.
On Tuesday, several kyiv residents said scheduled power outages had forced them to reorganize their daily lives. Anna Yatsenko, a 37-year-old film producer and mother of four, said that as soon as the power comes back on, she uses her electronic devices to cool her house, iron and wash clothes.
“My husband gets up and recharges the power banks,” Yatsenko said. “You can’t turn on the kettle. It is a luxury to use a hair dryer.”
Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the kyiv-based Energy Research Center, said during a news conference on Monday that the power grid would not be fully repaired for at least two years.
“We understand that over the next two years we must be prepared for daily outages as a norm, not as a critical situation for us,” Kharchenko said. “Honestly, all we can do is get used to this being a normal situation.”