Ukrainian energy giant DTEK, in a joint venture with US company Honeywell and Canada’s SunGrid Solutions, yesterday opened the country’s first energy storage facility, a moment which was described by Minister of Ecology Roman Abramovsky as “the beginning of a long path to energy diversification”.
The official opening of the 2.25MWh-capacity battery unit, which can supply up to 1MW at any given time, was held jointly via video link in two places: at the plant’s location in the town of Energodar, located in Zaporizhia Oblast, and in DTEK’s headquarters in Kyiv. It’s a start but still very small scale, considering Ukraine’s electrical power consumption of 133.20 billion kilowatt hours.
DTEK’s CEO, Maksym Tymchenko, declared that the company, which is the largest energy group in Ukraine, “could not decline to take the responsibility, and even maybe bravery, to take the first step” in opening the plant.
The development of energy storage facilities is considered to be a significant global step in making renewable energy sources more viable, as wind and solar installations often produce excess power at times of low demand which cannot be used and is therefore wasted.
“We can use energy when it is not being generated… Energy storage is like (television) streaming” explained Emanuele Volpe, DTEK’s chief innovation officer.
The Deputy Minister of Energy, Maksym Nemchynov, lavished praise on DTEK for taking this step: “Here we have a situation of a private company outpacing the government. In the government, we are only considering this, while the company actually creates it.”
He also conceded that “there is currently no legislative framework for energy storage systems,” and promised that the Energy Ministry would work with the National Commission for State Regulation of Energy and Public Utilities to create one in due course.
DTEK’s owner, Rinat Akhmetov, who is also Ukraine’s richest man, did not attend the opening ceremony. However, DTEK’s press release of the event quotes him as saying that “energy storage is the key to the growth of energy security of our country, as well as a new area of growth for Ukrainian energy.”
Panelists discuss on May 20, 2021, at the Kyiv launch of DTEK’s Energodar energy storage facility. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Trade representatives from the US and Canadian embassies also spoke at the event, both welcoming co-operation between businesses from their countries and DTEK.
Tymchenko conceded that at present, this was a loss-making venture for the company: “One of the tasks in scaling up this project is establishing a business model… at the moment (a profitable model) does not exist, this business does not pay off.” However, he maintained that his team’s research showed that energy storage facilities could reduce the price per KWh of electricity, and that he believed a profitable solution could eventually be found.
According to DTEK’s Energy Storage Lead Vadym Utkin, the plant will use lithium-ion batteries, arranged in ten banks, each with a capacity of 225KWh.
DTEK’s executive director, Dmytro Saharuk, said that the company is planning to open more storage facilities soon, although he did not announce any specific projects.
“I believe that this will be the first step, and in a year or 18 months we will be opening 50MW storage systems”, he told the audience.
While this is a ground-breaking moment in the Ukrainian energy sector, the Energodar plant is relatively small in global terms. The largest energy storage system in the world is located in the US state of California, and can store 1200MWh of electricity, with a maximum output of 300MW. This comes to over 530 times the storage capacity and 300 times the output of the DTEK plant.
In recent years, DTEK have sought to branch out from their traditional cornerstone of coal extraction into green energy sources. Since 2008, they have invested over $1.4 billion into renewables. However, coal nevertheless remains DTEK’s main source of energy, with the company having mined 18.9 million tons of the fossil fuel in 2020.
