An Wednesday afternoon, the largest electricity producer in the Kiev region published a message on its Facebook page: “Unfortunately, electricity consumption has increased again today.” Therefore, one is forced to temporarily restrict the power supply to customers again. The evening before, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked the Ukrainians in his evening speech for following the government’s call to save energy during the usual consumption peaks in the evening between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m percent and to stabilize the networks.
But the goal must be to use a quarter less electricity in the mornings and evenings over the next few days. Energy suppliers, network operators and city administrations are spreading advice on social media on how to achieve this goal: switch on no more than one electrical device at a time, only operate washing machines and other power-guzzling devices at night, use kettles less often and use thermos flasks instead.
However, that is not enough. Since the start of the week, the residents of Kiev and many other Ukrainian cities have had to live with the fact that their electricity has been switched off for hours at a time since the most extensive Russian rocket attacks to date. On Monday, electricity was temporarily disrupted in 15 regions across the country. In most of the cities targeted by rocket attacks, power plants were also hit. The supply has been restored almost everywhere. However, according to the network operator Ukrenergo, it will be at least a few days before the electricity is stable again and available without significant restrictions – provided that there are no further attacks of this magnitude. Meanwhile, talk show participants on Russian television are clamoring to demand that Ukraine’s energy infrastructure be completely destroyed with week-long daily attacks and that the country be plunged into cold and darkness.
Cyber attacks came before rockets
Around 30 percent of Ukraine’s entire energy infrastructure was damaged in the attacks on Monday and Tuesday, Ukrainian Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko announced on Wednesday. The main target was thermal power plants. But the attackers would have targeted objects throughout the supply chain – such as substations – to make it more difficult to reconnect and switch to other power sources.
Ukrainian companies have gained a lot of experience in this over the past few months, because the Ukrainian energy supply was a target of the Russian army from the very first days of the war. There were also days in spring and summer when up to a million people were without electricity. Even before the attacks this week, around half of all thermal power plants, a good third of solar power generation and 90 percent of wind power plants were either non-functional or in occupied areas, according to the Department of Energy.
The power supply has also been the target of thousands of cyber attacks in recent months. According to official figures, at the beginning of October about 1,300 settlements with a total of more than 725,000 inhabitants were without electricity due to damage caused by fighting. Most of these settlements are located in the east of Ukraine – in the Donbass and Kharkiv regions.
Nevertheless, Ukraine was still able to export electricity to the neighboring countries of Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Moldova until the beginning of this week. After the rocket attacks, however, electricity exports were suspended on Tuesday. This is a major problem, especially for the Republic of Moldova, which gets a significant part of its electricity from Ukraine. The country is now being forced to tap into its gas supplies to secure its grid – and this in the context of a threat by the country’s main gas supplier, the Russian group Gazprom, to stop deliveries altogether on October 20.
