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Lessons from the front lines of the Ukraine war
5/5/2026
8 min read
Feature
While living through a military conflict might seem unthinkable, Ukrainians have been doing just that for more than four years. During this gruelling period, they have found ways to keep their energy system going to power life. A week before the Energy Institute broadcasts a free webinar on energy security lessons from the Ukraine war, New Energy World Senior Editor Will Dalrymple MEI reports on presentations made at International Energy Week in late February, before the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Ukraine’s power grid has become the front lines of war. Generation units and energy infrastructure have been targeted, damaged and destroyed. Under such conditions, the country has learned, the hard way, how to cope.
Kit Guest, CEO of UK microgrid technology supplier Swanbarton, which works in Ukraine, set the scene. He said: ‘We shouldn’t pretend that just because we’re on our sceptred isle we are all immune from this. For one, aggression can cross the sea. For another, we have interconnectors. Energy crosses borders; drones and missiles certainly can. Now that might seem far off; whether it is or not, we can all agree that to de-risk our energy system is a good idea. So, practically, what does that look like? It looks like decentralising the supply. It looks like decentralising the demand. It looks like decentralising the storage assets. Yes, there’s an economy of scale to [install] a massive generator of whatever fuel source, a massive storage asset of whatever chemistry. I agree that in the short term, that is commercially attractive, but it is not resilient.’
He outlined why decentralisation matters. ‘By a dispersed attack we’re talking about multiple drones, often numbering in the hundreds. A drone wave of 2–400 is not an uncommon Russian offensive tactic. When we’re considering an energy network, we can think of just nodes and links, and at each node is either going to be generation, demand or storage, so a very simple systems diagram. [For a] centralised network, a dispersed attack does not need to get lucky. It just needs to focus on the centralised generation assets; you lose 95% like that. If you’ve got decentralised generation, you’re immediately far more resilient. So, if you knock out 5% of the network, 5% of the grid, you lose 5–10% of the generation assets. You lose what gets hit; you don’t have second- and third-order effects across the network.’