Marunich: The situation with coal in Ukraine is not just critical - it is getting worse every day
The shortage of coal at Ukrainian thermal power plants has become more than critical. Ukraine already consumes much more electricity than a year ago, and reserves, on the contrary, are much smaller.
Dmitry Marunich, co-chairman of the Energy Strategies Fund, stated this at a press conference in Kyiv, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“As of the 15th, there were 378 thousand tons of coal in the warehouses of thermal power plants. The week before the 15th there were 470+ thousand tons of coal. In a week they burned 100 thousand tons of coal and did not replace it.
What does this mean? The situation is not just a crisis, it is getting worse day by day.
Plus, the average air temperature is decreasing. Electricity consumption has increased compared to the same period last year. This is a very important factor. It grew by an average of 6%. This happened because some households again switched to using electric energy for heating.
And this year, at current temperature conditions, our consumption is at the level of 21 MW. There was no trace of this last year; we reached these levels already during the winter frosts.
Now, obviously, everything will be different. This makes the situation even worse. That is, we have less coal than last year, and electricity consumption has already increased.
Sufficient volumes of coal will no longer be delivered, this is obvious. The Ministry of Energy, together with Energoatom, is implementing a bold hypothesis of operating 14 nuclear power units during the heating season, which should, according to estimates, replace 3 million tons of coal. Will it work? This is how God sends it.
We have witnessed repeated failures of units not only of thermal power plants but also of nuclear power plants. No one will put an improperly functioning unit into operation. This is a question of security not only energy, but also physical, and not even of Ukraine alone, but of entire regions and the planet.
This is all a hypothesis, it may not come true. Only the import of electricity will save us, which now goes only in the Ukraine-Belarus direction,” said Dmitry Marunich.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.