KYIV, Ukraine — Ongoing power outages have plagued towns and villages across Ukraine following widespread Russian attacks this week that officials say damaged about 30% of the country’s power infrastructure.
While experts say the country had prepared for such strikes, officials have urged people to save energy, and it could be weeks before repairs to the system are complete. Many people in the country – Western Europe’s electricity supplier – believe more needs to be done to secure supply ahead of winter.
Attacks on the country’s energy system continued on Wednesday, with reports of strikes on power infrastructure in Kamianske, an industrial town on the Dnipro River in eastern Ukraine.
“There is a serious fire and destruction; rescuers tame the flames,” Valentyn Reznichenko, head of the regional military administration, wrote in a statement on Telegram. “Then the electrical engineers will try to restore the equipment.”
The recent attacks have damaged energy facilities in 12 regions and in the capital, Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his late night speech on Wednesday. He added that “the technical capacity of electricity supply” had been fully restored in all but four regions, and thanked local authorities and citizens for the reduction in energy consumption.
The mass strikes are the first time since the start of the war that Russian forces have targeted energy infrastructure so extensively, officials said. Russian President Vladimir V. Putin described the attacks as retaliation for an explosion that knocked down part of a bridge between Russia and Crimea and which he blamed on Ukraine.
Ukraine prepared as much as possible for a scenario in which energy infrastructure was targeted, ensuring that additional equipment and other contingency plans were in place, officials said.
Power plants can operate independently, so the country can be “divided into islands of energy supply” even when the connections between them are damaged, noted Ivan Plachkov, Ukraine’s former energy minister. .
The system has some resilience and some reserve, and it will be fixed, said Nataliya Katser-Buchkovska, an expert on the country’s energy system, a former member of Ukraine’s parliament and founder of the Ukrainian Fund for Sustainable Development. “But we think it will take a few weeks.”
The government said it would halt energy exports after Monday’s strikes, disrupting a source of revenue that has boosted Ukraine’s economy through months of war.
Addressing the boards of governors of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank on Wednesday, Zelensky called for $57 billion to address Ukraine’s dire financial situation, including $2 billion earmarked for expanding exports to Europe and the restoration of energy infrastructure.
During the Soviet era in the 1970s and early 80s, the country became a center of electricity generation. Many nuclear and coal-fired power stations were created, hydroelectric systems were developed, and transmission lines were built to sell electricity to Western Europe.
In a typical year, before the pandemic changed consumption patterns, the country produced almost twice as much energy as needed for domestic consumption, experts said, much of it sold to the public. ‘Europe.
Ukraine’s renewable energy sources have also been affected by the war. Twelve percent of its overall power supply came from renewables, such as solar and wind power, Ms Katser-Buchkovska said. But since the war started and parts of the south and east were besieged, that amount has been halved.
She said she hoped to see more resilient decentralized regeneration, allowing more homes to have access to electricity even if their local power plant is taken out of service, be part of these plans, as well as the use of more sustainable sources of energy, to make the country less vulnerable to attack.
“We need to rebuild not in an old-fashioned style, but to make it more efficient, more decentralized and sustainable,” she said. “Energy has always been used as a weapon by the Russian Federation, so when we restore and rebuild, we have to take that into account.”
Ben Shpigel contributed report.