What will happen to the electricity supply in winter: DTEK made disappointing forecasts

DTEK has released a disappointing forecast of possible power outages this winter. The company's CEO Dmitry Sakharuk said that in case of prolonged Russian strikes on the energy system's facilities, Ukrainians could be left without electricity for more than 20 hours a day.

This means that access to electricity will be limited to less than four hours a day. According to Sakharuk, there are only 120 days left to restore the power grid before the heating season, but the scale of the damage is very large, CNN reports.

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He emphasized that it is necessary to restore damaged stations, improve the capacity of interconnectors and build distributed generators, at least in some places. Otherwise, the situation with electricity supply will be extremely difficult.

Ukraine is trying to solve the problem in various ways. Experts are using parts from decommissioned power plants in Europe to speed up the restoration of damaged facilities. Officials, in turn, are providing the country with generators to support critical infrastructure and working with European partners to increase electricity imports.

Ukrenergo CEO Volodymyr Kudrytsky said earlier that preparing Ukraine's power system for winter could cost more than $1.5 billion. Full recovery would require tens of billions of dollars. So far, almost half of the generating capacity has been lost, leading to severe scheduled outages.

Nevertheless, the Ministry of Energy assures that it has managed to restore some critical equipment and is preparing generation facilities for the fall and winter period. It is hoped that the strict shutdown schedules discussed by DTEK will not be introduced.

Ukraine's Energy Minister Herman Galushchenko earlier emphasized that there is no threat of blackouts at the moment: "Unfortunately, the enemy's attacks will continue, but the power system is intact. There will be no total blackout in the country."

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