Centralized national assets like power grids represent vulnerable targets in conflicts, whether wars or terror attacks. The Russia-Ukraine conflict provides a case in point. Although replacing a centralized national grid is not possible for the moment in Ukraine, the argument for deploying distributed energy power generation doesn’t have a better case for justification. It should have nations looking at how they produce energy for their citizens.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it thought resistance would vanish as it sent its troops on a military parade down the highway to Kyiv. After all, Russia in 2014 seized the Crimean Peninsula with almost no resistance from the Ukrainian military. The subsequent separatist outbreak in the Eastern Ukraine Donbas region did lead to Ukrainian resistance, but the war was low intensity.
The special military operation, the name Vladimir Putin gave to the 2022 invasion, now entering its fourth year, dramatically widened the conflict in Eastern Ukraine and led to attacks aimed at leaving Ukrainians freezing in the dark. If the Ukrainian armies couldn’t be defeated in the field, Russia targeted the country’s large, centralized assets: the power grid, thermal and nuclear power plants, transportation networks, and natural gas infrastructure.
Ukraine’s Grid Vulnerability Defined
Russia deployed its advantages in the air to bomb and strike targets that would most negatively impact Ukraine’s population and its ability to resist. By the end of 2024, Ukraine experienced 80% reduction in capacity from its thermal power plants, and saw a 50% drop in transmission to homes for heating and lighting.
How cold does it get in Ukraine? Last night, Kyiv experienced temperatures of between minus 14 and 17 Celsius (6.8 to 1.4 Fahrenheit). Imagine what that’s like without heating in your home or workplace.
Going Without Power
I’ve personally experienced prolonged power disruptions twice. The two were:
The Great Blackout of August 2003 saw the grid system powering eight U.S. states, plus Ontario and Quebec, fail. It took two days to restore. Fortunately, it was summer.
The Toronto Ice Storm of December 2013 saw freezing rain encase the city in ice, causing massive power failures, downed trees and powerlines, leaving over 300,000 without power for as long as a week. Our apartment lost power for five days. We ended up in a hotel, inundated with hundreds of other displaced people and pets. It looked like a war zone or refugee camp. After we got our power back, the frozen water pipes in the building’s walls burst, causing a flood. We moved out again. Two months later, with content and infrastructure replaced and repaired, we returned.
I cannot imagine experiencing what Ukrainians are dealing with through rolling blackouts in freezing temperatures. It is no wonder, therefore, that Ukraine is trying to move as quickly as possible to a decentralized energy distribution infrastructure. Others should take heed.
Why? Because, as you can see from the two experiences I described, a war isn’t the only action that can make centralized power networks vulnerable. Extreme weather, earthquakes and other natural disasters can be equally threatening.
Decentralized and Distributed Energy Answers
What do we mean by decentralized and distributed energy systems?
Renewable energy sources come to mind. Rooftop solar and battery packs, and passive geothermal systems are solutions that individual homes can deploy to go off the grid.
There are, however, many other technologies that Ukraine can and is using to begin to eliminate the country’s vulnerability to predatory strikes on its energy infrastructure.
These include:
Microgrids to generate power locally, featuring rooftop solar panels, inverters, backup battery storage, and backup generators that burn biomass, propane, biogas or natural gas.
CHPs (Combined Heat and Power) units to power multiple homes and clusters of buildings. Also known as cogenerators, they vary in output from 5 to 20 MegaWatts of electricity, with the waste heat produced distributed by pipelines to local structures. CHPs can use energy from local fuel sources as previously described.
Point-to-Point systems to provide on-site power for short distances (think a long power cord), drawing electricity from sources like solar arrays, wind turbine rooftop clusters and onsite geothermal power.
What the above three do is eliminate the vulnerability that comes with a centralized energy generation with its many moving parts, including electrical substations, transmission lines, grid-scale inverters, and gas line infrastructure. Instead, energy distribution gets “islanded,” secure from large-scale disruptions.
Ukraine Sets Energy Goals
Currently, Ukraine plans to move from its inherited Soviet-era grid, adding to its existing thermal power plants and high-risk nuclear sites, local CHPs and CHP clusters generating from 5 to 100 MegaWatts. The country has set a 2030 target to increase its use of distributed energy and renewables to deliver 27% of the country’s total power needs. Currently, Ukraine is embedding small and medium cogeneration units into urban settings to provide district heating and electricity.
That doesn’t mean Ukraine will abandon its large hydroelectric, nuclear and thermal power generation capacity. These will still be needed for electricity used in industry, transportation and other infrastructure. But now, even these larger consumers of power will have supplementary cogeneration and small-scale renewable capacity that ensures, even in the face of an aggressor state like Russia, or a set of unforeseen natural disasters, Ukrainians won’t be left in the dark and the cold.
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