Ukraine had a plan to make its power grid so dispersed that Russia could not destroy it, but it barely built it. Kyiv should have moved much faster to deploy a network of small power plants more resistant to Russian attacks, but over several years, it built only about 700 megawatts of gas generation against a power deficit of 7,000 megawatts, former Ukrenergo board chairman Volodymyr Kudrytskyi said on Espreso.
The shortfall leaves Ukraine facing another winter with the same vulnerable grid. Russia has systematically damaged Ukraine's thermal and hydro generation since 2022, and most of the large power plants were damaged again last winter. The fix, dispersing generation into many small plants that are dozens of times harder to find and hit, was meant to end that cycle, but it has not.
The failure is measured in the gap
Kudrytskyi put the deficit in stark numbers. Last winter, President Zelenskyy cited a 7,000-megawatt deficit during peak cold periods. Ukraine has built only about 10% of its gas generation capacity over these years.
At that pace, recovery is a generation away. If Ukraine keeps moving at the current rate, it would take 10 to 20 years to compensate for the capacity lost to Russian strikes, Kudrytskyi said, calling the distributed-generation program, at the required scale, effectively a failure.
Dispersal was the whole point
The case for small plants is that Russia cannot destroy what it cannot find. If it keeps destroying Ukraine's 10 to 15 large power plants, Kudrytskyi argued, the country should build a network of many small ones, dozens of times harder to locate, reconnoiter, and damage, resistant even to ballistic strikes by virtue of their dispersal and small size.
The right measure of the situation, he said, is not how many big plants are damaged but how much strike-resistant new generation has been built. By that measure, the answer is: not nearly enough.
The causes go beyond money
Kudrytskyi, who says the distributed-generation concept was developed in 2023 and presented to Ukraine's top leadership when he led Ukrenergo, put the price of building even 3,000 megawatts at nearly $2.1 to 2.3 billion. But money is not the only obstacle, he said, citing lost time, the energy sector's weak appeal to investors, and management problems and corruption risks.
With three months until the next heating season, he said, the situation cannot be fundamentally fixed for the coming winter.
