In April this year, construction began on around 130 protective structures for infrastructure in different regions. Sumy, Chernihiv, Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv come under attack every day, yet they still have electricity and water. A great deal has been done to protect them, mainly involving transformers, Serhii Sukhomlyn, former head of Ukraine’s Agency for Recovery and Infrastructure Development, said at a discussion organised by LB and EFI Group.
In its Resilience Plans, the government proposed taking a more comprehensive approach. There are four areas of work, including distributed generation, the required number of generators, and the physical protection of these facilities.
“As of today, if we take the end of April as an objective starting point, construction began on all these facilities, the connection of CHP units (cogeneration plants. – Ed.), the installation of new block-modular boiler houses, and the construction of new boiler houses. I’ll put it this way: today there are around 2,000 such facilities in the country. That is not a small number,” he said.
On average, the Resilience Plans are currently about 50% complete. That is also not bad, because a significant number of regions had no relevant experience.
Work on Kyiv’s substations began in early May. At present, the completion level across the city is close to 80%, and they are due to finish by the end of the month. The Agency is also building protection at major substations. These are very large facilities, and whereas they used to take two years to build, they now take about six months. They want to complete the work to protect the major substations in the autumn.
The government instructed the Agency to build several dozen facilities, with the city itself building the same number. For heat supply, they plan to build 520 MW of capacity. One of the facilities will operate partly at CHP-5 and partly at CHP-4, and will provide Rusianivka and Berezniaky in the event of emergencies.
“They are being built semi-underground, with a second level of protection,” he said.
These facilities will be ready later, roughly in December.
“What this heating season will be like is hard to say. If this protection had not been in place today in Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro and Kharkiv, there would already be no electricity, no water, nothing,” the former Agency head added.
In Zaporizhzhia alone, 15 facilities have been built. But Russia now carries out most strikes using jet-powered drones with different capabilities from those the protection was designed for. Recently, the enemy struck the 330th transformer in one of the cities, but the protection held. Without it, the city would already be without electricity.