What Ukraine's Energy System Got Done This Summer — And What It Won't Finish Before Winter

The coming heating season will evidently be harder than the last. The president says so, the prime minister says so, and so do specialists in the power industry and municipal utilities. Every Ukrainian, in the end, understands it too. Unpalatable as it is, we have to treat the likelihood of such a scenario as all but axiomatic. So we must be ready for it. The task is to shield ourselves from enemy strikes as far as possible—a job for air defense and engineering protection—and to prepare for the rapid restoration of damaged infrastructure. Two things will help here: the repair experience gained during earlier waves of intensive enemy shelling, and the stock of equipment and spare parts built up with the help of international partners, which the Ministry of Energy assures us is a solid one.

Electricity: no “two-hours-a-day” schedules, but…

Preparations for the coming winter began early, yet with two or three months to go before the 2026/27 heating period may begin, the planned works are still far from complete. According to the reports of the relevant agencies and of local municipalities, readiness in some areas runs at up to 70 percent, in others at barely half.

One of the principal tasks is to strengthen the engineering and physical protection of critical energy infrastructure. It has to be understood that complexes of this kind—usually enormous ones—cannot be shielded from enemy strikes entirely, all the more so when Ukraine is critically short of interceptor missiles. But preparing in advance will, in the event of a hit, cut emergency repair times to a minimum, which matters especially in winter. And the protection at issue is, of course, against indirect missile hits and drone attacks.

Responding to a query from ZN.UA, the Ministry of Energy said that several strands of work are proceeding in parallel: the technical preparation of generating capacity and grids for operation under heavier loads, repairs to power plants and the accumulation of emergency reserves of materials and critical equipment—above all power transformers, autotransformers and high-voltage equipment, together with other supplies needed to deal swiftly with the consequences of possible damage.

“At the same time, information on how well individual companies in the fuel and energy sector are actually supplied with backup equipment, on the numbers of transformers, autotransformers and other equipment, and on the level of emergency reserves accumulated, is classified as restricted, since releasing it could create additional risks for the functioning of critical infrastructure under martial law,” the Ministry of Energy press service stressed.

Speaking during the government question hour in the Verkhovna Rada, First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy Denys Shmyhal reported that 4.8 GW of generating capacity had already been repaired in Ukraine this year and almost 200 second-level protective structures had been built. Repairs to a further 4 GW are under way. In all, more than 10 GW of capacity is due to be restored or built in 2026. Among other things, there are plans to install equipment from decommissioned thermal and combined heat and power plants in Lithuania, Germany and Latvia.

The minister also said that distributed gas-fired generation with a combined capacity of 1.8 GW is already operating in Ukraine. A further 800 MW is to be installed by the end of the year, and work to connect more than 280 units is under way.

“The leader in connecting gas cogeneration units is Kyiv oblast, where more than 219 MW has been installed. Over 100 MW has been installed in Cherkasy (129.3 MW), Dnipropetrovsk (118.2 MW), Volyn (113.6 MW), Ivano-Frankivsk (108.8 MW), Sumy (103.6 MW) and Zakarpattia (100.3 MW) oblasts,” the Ministry of Energy press service specified.

More than half of Ukraine’s electricity, as is well known, comes from nuclear power plants. Shmyhal reported that three of the nine reactors on territory controlled by Ukraine are currently undergoing repairs; all of them will be connected to the grid before the cold weather arrives.

Serhii Diachenko, head of the Bureau of Comprehensive Analysis and Forecasting, hopes that “the safety switch will trip” and that Russia will refrain from terrorist attacks on these facilities.

“I don’t think the enemy will fire at nuclear plants. Besides, they are very robust structures. As a researcher I worked on questions of structural strength in my time, and even defended a dissertation on the subject. I also took some part in the design calculations for nuclear power plants: the margins there are very substantial indeed,” the expert told ZN.UA.

He also stressed that the protection of substations and of other elements of the transmission and distribution system has genuinely improved. And thanks to earlier experience, power engineers have learned to restore such facilities quickly once they are damaged.

“The conclusion from all this is that, if intensive attacks on Ukraine’s power system resume, there will probably be long outages. But not so long that the forecasts of ‘two hours of electricity a day at most’ come true,” Diachenko says reassuringly.

The Ministry of Energy, for its part, named no figures, pointing out that the projected operating regimes of Ukraine’s Integrated Power System, consumption volumes, expected capacity and electricity balances, and the scope for imposing supply restrictions are all determined by the transmission system operator, which takes into account weather forecasts, the availability of generating capacity, repair schedules, the operating regimes of neighboring countries’ power systems, the scope for importing electricity and, of course, the security situation.

“Given the large number of factors that can affect the operation of the power system under martial law, forecasting possible hourly outage schedules is necessarily scenario-based and will depend above all on the consequences of any attacks on energy infrastructure and on the actual condition of the system,” the Ministry of Energy press service concluded.

No gas “famine” this winter. But what about heat?

The Ministry of Energy also assured ZN.UA that the lessons of the 2025/26 heating season have been taken into account in meeting the country’s gas needs:

“The priorities remain unchanged: securing the necessary reserves of natural gas, keeping domestic production stable, diversifying import sources and making gas infrastructure more resilient to possible attacks. Repairing damaged production facilities and building up reserves for the reliable operation of the gas transmission system remains an important strand of preparations for the autumn-winter period.”

The ministry added that gas-fired generation is increasingly being used to support the power system while electricity generating capacity remains damaged.

Serhii Diachenko agrees: gas stocks are in reasonable shape—especially set against some earlier years, when there was barely enough to see the country through the heating period, and even then only because the winters were not severe.

Domestic production, on the other hand, is in a far worse state after the enemy stepped up its strikes on production infrastructure. Since the beginning of the year, Russia has attacked Naftogaz facilities almost 300 times. Private companies have taken hits too. Despite prompt repairs, part of the country’s production capacity has been shut down and domestic output has fallen sharply.

In these circumstances, the accelerated pace at which both domestic and imported gas is being injected into underground storage offers at least some grounds for optimism. According to Denys Shmyhal, 14.3 billion cubic metres of gas have already been accumulated in storage—far more than at the same point last year (roughly 11 billion cubic metres).

“And that is no bad thing. Gas is an important reserve fuel: a large share of the country’s heating runs on it. We also do not always have enough fast-response reserves, so we usually close the balance with gas-fired thermal power plants. So if the equipment is working, there will be fuel for it. And it is a resource that Russian strikes have almost no way of reaching,” Diachenko comments.

Gas transmission infrastructure is also far easier to repair as compared to electricity infrastructure.

“And striking the equipment of gas networks is no easy task. Hitting a facility that small—especially by comparison with a combined heat and power plant—with a missile is quite difficult. And we have gradually learned to defend ourselves against Shahed drones. Strikes on the pipelines themselves are ineffective too,” the head of the Bureau of Comprehensive Analysis and Forecasting believes.

By way of illustration, he recalled the attempts by illegal armed formations in Donetsk to carry out attacks on trunk gas pipelines. As a rule, everything was repaired within a week or two.

“And secondly, our system is very extensively branched. The distribution networks are underground in any case, while the trunk lines have alternative ‘strings’, so there is always a way of pumping fuel around a damaged section,” the expert says.

Coal stocks in Ukraine are sufficient too, by Diachenko’s assessment. But the reasons here are somewhat different: it is less a matter of brisk purchasing than of a sharp fall in the need for the fuel. Sadly, very little of the country’s heat and power generation still runs on coal.

And the biggest headache, of course, is keeping Ukrainians warm. Since last winter, closer attention has been paid to delivering on plans to install distributed generation—local sources of heat and electricity (cogeneration units, modular boiler houses, gas turbine units). It is no secret (and ZN.UA wrote about this last year) that until things “got hot” the previous winter, in many municipalities such equipment—most of it donated by international partners and philanthropists—sat idle for years in warehouses or simply out in the open. The state has now simplified permitting procedures and introduced customs and tax exemptions on imports of energy equipment. Municipalities, too, have visibly picked up the pace after the lessons of last winter. The only question is whether it is too late. The cogeneration units in question, which produce electricity and heat at the same time, really can save individual neighbourhoods from freezing. But for a large city—the capital, say—they are not enough.

Kyiv, incidentally, has reported that almost half of the works planned in preparation for the heating season are complete. A number of large projects are due to be finished by the end of the year. According to mayor Vitali Klitschko, one of the main tasks is to create a backup system that will supply Kyivans with heat, electricity and water if large generating facilities are destroyed.

A fallback for the worst case is being weighed as well. The capital is drawing up lists in advance of residents with limited mobility who might need temporary relocation if heating is lost for a long period—above all elderly people living alone, people with disabilities and families raising children with disabilities.

Meanwhile the Ministry for Recovery, Infrastructure and Transport has reported that, as of mid-August, 918.5 MW of backup power supply had been secured across the country—75.6 percent of what heat and water supply facilities need. The unmet requirement stands at 296.2 MW.

“As of 1 August, 83,553 residential buildings had been prepared for the heating season, or 58 percent of the plan; 14,962 social infrastructure facilities, or 62.7 percent; 10,590 boiler houses, or 61.7 percent; 10,400 km of heating networks; 2,457 water supply and 1,516 sewage pumping stations,” the ministry specified.

Two questions arise here, though. Will there be enough time before the cold sets in to complete all the planned works? And second: was enough planned in the first place for our cities to hold out and not freeze this winter, despite the enemy’s attacks? The assessments we hear vary. But everyone, probably, agrees that this is the moment to put our backs into it. Because every day of summer and of the warm part of autumn used efficiently guarantees us at least 0.01 percent more relief in the difficult winter ahead.

Read this article in Ukrainian and russian.