Page 64 - UKRRptJun21

top regions cited were: Odesa, Zakarpattia, Zaporizhia and Lviv. The survey was conducted by Operative Sociology company and presented yesterday at a press conference with Oleksandr Tkachenko, Culture and Information Policy Minister.
9.1.9 Utilities sector news
Ukraine is banning the import of electricity from Belarus and Russia for four months, until Oct. 1. “We remember our experience last winter,” Valeriy Tarasiuk, chairman of the National Energy and Utilities Regulatory Commission of Ukraine said yesterday at a public meeting. After power stations ran short of coal, the government imported electricity, first from Belarus in January, then from Russia in February. The move to stop electricity imports started before Belarus forced down the Ryanair passenger jet on Sunday. President Zelensky seeks to make Energoatom, Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear power producer, profitable Responsible for producing half of Ukraine’s electricity, Energoatom lost $177mn last year.
Ukraine’s electricity consumption is forecast to fall by one quarter during the 2020s, predicts GlobalData, a London-based data provider. During the last decade, electricity consumption fell by 9%, to 127.3 terawatts, GlobalData says. Looking ahead, Pavan Vyakaranam, a GlobalData executive, cited several factors for the big drop in the 2020s: “One of the most prominent is its declining population. A slowdown in the commercial and industrial sectors will continue to impact demand in future.”
Ukraine will meet the 18-month deadline to synchronize its power system with the EU one, Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, Ukrenergo board chairman, told the battery storage event. The head of Ukraine’s state-owned electricity distribution company, promised: “Synchronization of the Ukrainian energy system with the European one in 2023 will take place. Period.” He said that if Ukraine has more ‘flexibility’ – including industrial energy storage systems – it will allow Ukraine to export more power to the EU.
The National Energy and Utilities Regulatory Commission of Ukraine (NEURC) has banned the import of power from Russia and Belarus until October 1 when the government will assess its winter preparations.
NEURC said it would limit the available capacity for importing electricity to Ukraine from states that are not parties to the Energy Community, which does not include Russia or Belarus).
"We take this decision on the initiative of Energy Minister Herman Haluschenko, who made such a request to us. At the same time, we remember our experience and this winter, and remember the balance of interests, because we also think about consumers and about that, theoretically, the termination of imports as a market mechanism can lead to abuses and manipulations in the market," Chairman of NEURC Valeriy Tarasiuk said as cited by Interfax.
This is not the first time Ukraine has threatened to cut off Belarusian power imports, but embarrassingly it imported a record amount of power from Belarus in first months of this year – more than it did in all of 2020. A cold snap sent the demand for power shooting up at a time when Ukraine was already low on coal supplies to power its own power stations. At the same time Belarus’ new nuclear power station came online in January giving the small state ample capacity to export
64 UKRAINE Country Report XXXX 2018 www.intellinews.com