Lessons from the front lines of the Ukraine war

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.’

CEO of DTEK Maxim Timchenko HonFEI explained how Ukrainians are building decentralised energy in real time. He said: ‘We have solar wind parks in Ukraine, [built] before the war and during the war, and we are always proudly saying that probably we are the only company who managed to build the largest battery storage system in Ukraine during the war.’ He pointed to a recently commissioned 200 MW battery energy storage system (BESS), and to the final stages of construction of a 500 MW onshore wind park, as well as plans to build another 650 MW capacity wind farm (the Poltavska wind farm in central Ukraine, consisting of 100 turbines). ‘You cannot find this scale size wind parks built in Europe onshore,’ he stated.

DTEK reported in April that its annual investment in 2025 almost doubled to UAH 45.4bn (€964mn), compared with UAH 23bn (€530mn) in 2024, reflecting the further expansion of the company’s activities during wartime.

It added that these new decentralised projects will strengthen Ukraine’s energy resilience while contributing to European energy security and the clean energy transition, as well as supporting deeper integration with EU energy markets.

Timchenko added that private citizens in flats and apartments have installed domestic solar panels and battery storage. Because of systems like these, Ukraine boasts about 1.7 GW of distributed generation. Timchenko said: ‘This is basically transformation in war. The world has never seen this [much] transformation of the value system. And this is happening, and I'm confident that we'll be proud of what we're doing now, because we put in the condition that there is no other choice.’

How do you build resilience?   
Olga Michelot, Co-Owner of energy infrastructure engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) firm Helios Strategia, explained what that has meant in practice: building physical protection of grid infrastructure so that damage from a drone explosion is limited to 10% of the installation. That means protecting electricity transport infrastructure with concrete.

‘We thought about [building] underground stations, actually to put some equipment underground. Technically it's possible, but the problem is not technical, it's financial; it's really costly.’ She added that the country also needs air defences, and defence from electromagnetic and cyberattacks, and grid. ‘In Ukraine, there is a Soviet grid, an old grid. And in Soviet times, the grid wasn't bad, because right now we maybe survive because it was double [the necessary] capacity. But the problem is it's an old grid, and [now] we are constructing a lot of renewable energy, and with this old grid it is not a compatible marriage.’

Helios has had the support of UK microgrid firm Swanbarton, as Guest explained. The first step was about ensuring security, but that wasn’t all. He added: ‘We started with a micro grid, but this is transferable. It's just a systems approach, and looking at decentralising the assets. My background is in the military. I'm very familiar with a decentralised aggressive approach and a decentralised defensive approach. We can take that and apply it to grid infrastructure, and at Swanbarton that's exactly what we've done to enable Helios to implement decentralised generation and storage, but also decentralised control of their demand.’

Ukraine’s need for power infrastructure provides innumerable opportunities for interesting projects. But, in the midst of conflict, danger is never far away. Companies have had to manage those difficulties, as Michelot observed. ‘My company is constructing right now projects in different parts of Ukraine. And yes, we have a risk… risk of missiles, risk of drones, etc. But we deal with it. It's possible to deal with it; it depends on how you organise your business.’

‘Right now, we have devices from Swanbarton that have arrived, and we have been waiting already a whole month to go to install them because, you know, it's hard to be responsible for professionals that could [die] on the on the road; we are waiting for the road to be easier to drive on, and then we will go and install [them].’ She added that there are big financial risks, but not without rewards.

However one approaches the situation in Ukraine, several speakers warned against assuming the risk is confined to one particular region. Those assumptions are becoming more and more dangerous in our increasingly uncertain world.

Timchenko had the last word. Among other points, he advised: ‘Build and institute strategic stocks. Get the weakest point of your power system. Understand how you design your power grid and how your critical infrastructure is connected.’

He summed up: ‘People should take care of their own houses. Countries’ energy systems [need to learn] from us, and [not] underestimate the threat coming from Russia. Energy systems of every country are vulnerable because no one has faced such a threat before. Probably it’s time to take it seriously, for governments and energy companies.’

• Further reading: ‘Best in show’. DTEK’s Ukraine’s Hidden Army project, which is training women to step into high-stakes underground mining roles for the first time, was among the winners in the Energy Institute’s 2026 International Energy Awards. Find out more.
• ‘Ukraine receives thermal power plant from Lithuania’. Discover how components of an entire thermal power plant capable of powering one million people were successfully relocated from Lithuania to Ukraine, with assistance from the European Commission and member states.