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Russia has shut off the main gas pipeline to Europe and may continue to cut gas supplies further. Recently, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi said that electricity can replace Russian gas. Andrii Kobolev, the former head of the Ukrainian state-owned energy company «Naftogaz», also suggested heating houses with electricity. The executive director of the «Energy Cities of Ukraine» Association, Svyatoslav Pavliuk, told whether Ukraine will be able to switch from gas to electricity and what steps can actually be implemented.
Heat power plants burn fuel, producing heat and electricity, and I don’t understand what else can be put there to produce something. There is initial fuel and initial two products. I think the cumulative capacity, the total amount of thermal energy, when measured in kilowatts and megawatts, generated from gas is now, I think, greater than the entire electric power system combined.
In Ukraine, it will not be physically possible to replace that much gas with electricity, because we simply do not have that much electricity. After all, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, is in an absolutely incomprehensible state, to which we do not have access, it is beyond our control. Secondly, our networks simply cannot withstand such a load and simply burn out.
It can be done relatively quickly only in some fragments of buildings, networks in certain cities. Imagine we have an area where there had been 200 houses, of which 10 remained and all the others were bombed. We understand that we do not have time to transfer networks, so it makes no sense to «drive» the boiler house at full capacity. If it is conventionally calculated for 500 megawatts, and we have a load of 50 megawatts or less, in these houses that have survived and will enter the heating season, then there is no point in «driving» such a huge heat power plant to heat these houses. There, the efficiency will be below zero.
Therefore, first of all, it’s necessary to conduct a survey of the city’s networks and the state of the buildings, to understand which ones enter the heating season, which ones do not, and only based on the results of this survey, it is possible to draw some conclusions. Because if the network is normal, nothing needs to be changed, then we need to see how to ensure fuel supply. Maybe put some solid fuel containers in reserve, maybe restore fuel oil farms that were at all these heat power plants, see what survived and pump fuel oil – that’s all we can manage in three months.
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Any changes to the boiler systems of the heat power plants will take half a year, maybe more. These are huge systems that require a lot of people, material, technical documentation – you can’t do it in three months.
There are certainly cities in Europe that have switched from gas to electricity, from Bielsko-Biała in Poland and further west. There are many of them. But this is not a quick process. We are talking about huge objects and huge investments.
Therefore, the maximum we can do in three months is to install control systems, perhaps order to construct container boiler houses, up to 5 megawatts each, so that a dozen boilers are in reserve in the region, and they can be promptly inserted and started if some city is shelled. It’s necessary to have a reserve of fuel, to have people who can mount all this. It’s impossible to replace a large heat power plant.
There are cities that are in the territory of relative safety, we need to think about some kind of diversification there, and there are cities that are destroyed, like Kremenchuk, they need to be restored. It is possible to raise some old boilers, old boiler rooms at enterprises that are mothballed if they are still «breathing» and can work.
But I wouldn’t restore the heat power plants in full, either, because we will have problems again in the event of a missile air attack. I would bet small and many. And this, again, is expensive. Of course, it is necessary to take into account both, but from the point of view of safety, the supply of smaller boiler houses will be safer.
By Svyatoslav Pavliuk, translated by Vitalii Holich
The author’s column is a reflection of the author’s subjective position. The editors of «Tvoe Misto» do not always share the opinions expressed in the columns, and are ready to give those who disagree the opportunity for a reasoned answer.
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