It may not be easy to tell from the stream of doomsday headlines about power cuts and missile barrages, but in important ways Ukraine’s energy system is much better protected now than it was when the first major grid attacks began in October 2022.
Anti-missile batteries were virtually nonexistent then, and although they remain supplied far below the level Kyiv’s military planners would like, they do work well where they can be deployed. Most of Ukrenergo’s transformers — enormous machines that push power through the grid — now sit behind thick concrete fortifications that perform surprisingly well under attack. Zaichenko said that during a recent barrage near Odessa, one of these fortifications was hit simultaneously by two missiles from opposite sides, and remained standing. The company often has to replace smaller pieces of equipment connected to a transformer, but rarely the transformer itself, which is good because they are expensive, time-consuming to build, and extremely cumbersome to transport.
Ukraine also has far more decentralized power than it did in 2022. That includes several new gigawatts worth of wind, solar, and grid-scale storage; about a gigawatt of midsized gas turbines; and innumerable diesel generators parked on sidewalks, which may be obnoxious and expensive but beat sitting in darkness — all of which, crucially, are not shown on any Soviet-era maps available to Moscow.
Ukrenergo has also worked out a system, Zaichenko said, through which it quickly processes information about incoming threats and redirects power away from the targeted substations to avoid bottlenecks. And the company is sitting on what is likely the world’s biggest stockpile of spare grid parts; “at this point I think we’ve taken every spare piece of equipment that was available in Europe,” Zaichenko said. The company’s engineers have learned to work at top speed, including in extremely dangerous settings close to the front line, often completing construction projects in a matter of days that engineers in the US and Europe would take weeks or months to do.
An important reason power cuts remain so pervasive, Zaichenko said, is that most of the country’s hydropower dams have been destroyed or are under occupation. Prior to the war, these dams were used in tandem with the nuclear plants to quickly ramp up or down in response to changes in demand. Now the nuclear plants still work (not counting the one in Zaporhizhzhia, which is under occupation) but the only way to balance the grid is by cutting demand, not adding more supply.
At this point, it’s unlikely that a significant escalation in grid attacks will be forthcoming, Oleksandr Kharchenko, managing director of the Energy Industry Research Center, a Kyiv think tank, said. Russia has few new targets other than directly attacking the nuclear stations themselves; that can’t be ruled out, but it would mark an escalation that would risk a globe-threatening nuclear meltdown and certainly derail any peace talks. “I’m absolutely sure [Russia is] already in the most intensive trajectory it can possibly manage,” Kharchenko said. “So I don’t think an apocalypse will happen, unless we reach an extreme shortage of air defense missiles.”