As Russia attacks Ukraine’s grid, solar offers a path to resilience

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By Anna Conkling, Grist, and co-published with The Kyiv Independent. 

Excerpt: On a spring day earlier this year, 10 men stood on the rooftop of a door manufacturing facility in the central Ukrainian town of Bila Tserkva, surveying the rows of solar panels that surrounded them. Since Russia invaded in 2022, the town has endured repeated attacks, triggering mass power outages. For the factory, which supplies doors to homes and businesses, ...outages were particularly brutal in the winter, when limited power supplies led to rolling blackouts across the country. Some days, the employees burned discarded wood in a fireplace to keep the warehouse warm. ...Tired of relying on a grid that was being routinely bombarded by Russian missiles, Yaroslav, the facility’s owner, decided to switch to solar earlier this year. ...Volodymyr Hershtun, a service maintenance manager ...who led the project in Bila Tserkva, said ...“The enemy is trying to destroy energy infrastructure, and we are building what is very easy to restore ...And those same systems can store electric energy.” Before Russia’s invasion, Ukraine relied on a highly centralized electricity system dominated by nuclear power. More than half of the country’s electricity came from four nuclear power plants, while natural gas and coal generated roughly a quarter of the energy mix. ...“Renewables have become the very obvious choice for Ukraine when the full-scale invasion started and when Russia started deliberately and heavily attacking the energy infrastructure, especially the centralized generation facilities,” said Anastasia Vereshchynska, the director of the European-Ukrainian Energy Agency.... 

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