How Ukraine is evolving its energy system by building grid resilience

October 24, 2024 Editor

Serhii Zuiev, Chief Financial Officer, Dtek GRIDS, Ukraine

For most of us, bolstering the grid has been a matter of meeting net zero targets. But for Ukrainians, it has been a matter of life and death.

On the first day of Enlit Europe in Milan, Serhii Zuiev, Chief Financial Officer of DTEK Grids in Ukraine, explained during a press conference and in a keynote speech how keeping the grid stable has been a key challenge.

And although it has indeed proved a considerable challenge, with Russian attacks on the power system continuing since the start of the invasion in 2022, the country has learned to highly resilient and proactive.

According to Zuiev, since the start of the invasion, over 13 million reconnections have been logged, of course some of these being from recurring outages.

“Since the beginning of the war, 8,000 grid facilities have been destroyed or damaged and we’ve recovered almost all,” said Zuiev while laying out two key challenges the country’s energy system yet faces as the war with Russia continues.

The first of these, of course, is the need to keep the lights on. This is after nine waves of Russian missile barrages to date, with the latest in Ukraine’s summer bringing damage to 90% of the country’s thermal generation.

The second has been maintaining and enhancing how disconnections and reconnections are communicated.

“We had to understand how to work with customers and inform them [about power outages and reconnections].”

According to Zuiev, the challenge of communications to manage disconnections has been a huge pain point since the start of the war, with hundreds of thousands of calls being impossible to process.

“In the end we created a system together with Ukrenergo for informing [customers] across different zones, which helped a lot.”

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Coming out on top

Although the war continues, Zuiev emphasised the positive recovery efforts, not only by managing the outages and communications but also by upgrading the grid system and its management to prevent and mitigate such errors from occurring in the first place.

Specifically, Zuiev referenced the recently-announced digital twin pilot completed this year in Kyiv.

Announced earlies this month, DTEK Kyiv Regional Grids implemented the pilot at the Irpin energy junction.

The twin, which they call a digital double, is a virtual copy of the real distribution grid, which the company says accounts for all power facilities and features.

According to the company, the technology will help energy workers identify weak spots in the grid and the most efficient ways to reinforce them, reducing the number of emergencies, and, thus, interruptions of power supply for residents and business.

Commenting at the time was head of the grid analysis and long-term planning division at DTEK Grids Leonid Moskalen, who said: “One of the components that the digital twin allows to ensure is reducing the time of outages.

“Thanks to the estimation of digitalised data, we can see which elements have low reliability, and will be able to plan reinforcement of these elements in advance.

“Or find an alternative way to energise the customers without an urgent reinforcement of elements, but rather plan this required modernisation for the future. This way, we will improve reliability of power supply.”

For Zuiev, the digital twin – which the company hopes to expand regionally next year – is but one component of their plans to bolster the energy system with digitalisation.

Another, is installation of smart meters. “We have completed the digital twin of Kyiv region already… it’s a really good start for future development.

“We would [also] like to install up to 5 million smart meters within the next five years. At this point of time, our penetration of smart meters is slightly more than 20% but we would like to come up to 100% within the next five years.

“The smart meters are the first and important stage for smart development, and we will be replicating the digital twins for the whole country. This will help us to understand better, to test and simulate introduction of distributed generation and even interruptions to the system.

“So that even if the Russian attack will come, it will help us to turn power back much faster, because you can simulate everything. But of course, that’s a huge work ahead of us, and with that, we are actively looking for international support and help, which is already coming in.”