One lesson to learn from Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s power infrastructure is that electricity coming almost exclusively from a national operator over the grid can prove to be the Achilles’ heel for a country. In hindsight, when Ukraine back in 2017 was figuring out ways to disconnect from Russia’s power grid, it may have considered implementing a policy to encourage the building of distributed energy based on renewable sources such as rooftop solar and geothermal installations. Where the debate about distributed energy has tended to focus on how utilities can accommodate distributed energy being fed to the grid, in the future, there should be a second conversation. It should be about grid vulnerability to cyberattacks and physical bombardment in the event of war. Countries and utilities need to learn from the Ukraine experience and develop distributed energy strategies to keep the heat and lights on.
