UA 
In Kharkiv, the metro's peak demand is around 13 MW, yet the connected capacity of its largest metering points is 108 MW. Many municipal utilities are in the same position, sitting on permitted connection capacity they never use. That is an asset that can be monetised, says Oleksandr Vizir, a sectoral leader for Energy & Climate at the Ukraine Facility Platform, speaking on the ExPro Talks podcast.
How much distributed generation does Ukraine actually have, why did nearly 900 MW of donor equipment end up abandoned by the fence, and has corporate-governance reform happened at all?
How much new decentralised generation Ukraine has
Ukraine has neither a defined term for "distributed generation" nor any objective data on it: because it is so often installed behind the meter, the grid operator Ukrenergo simply cannot "see" it. As UAFP defines it, distributed generation is small-scale generation located close to the consumer.
Judging by solar-panel import figures, Ukraine has added roughly 1–1.5 GW of behind-the-meter solar in recent years, plus around 100 MW of utility-scale solar. Consumers have also connected some 250–300 MW of gas-piston units for their own use, and a further 1 GW or so of gas-fired generation has been linked to Ukraine's integrated power system.
The problem of generation left by the fence
As of March 2025, roughly 900 MW of donor-supplied generation was still not connected to the grid and was sitting idle. Some of this equipment was ruined before it ever ran and will never operate in Ukraine's power system.
How did this happen? Community leaders tend to define their needs incorrectly. Say a community needs around 2 MW; its municipal officials file a request with donors for exactly that. The donors send a gas unit with a total capacity of 2 MW – only for it to turn out that the unit cannot be connected, because the point with the highest connection capacity offers just 0.5 MW, and there is no alternative short of running a cable halfway across the region. Faced with this, community leaders leave the donor equipment sitting by the fence – units that could have powered water utilities, hospitals and other municipal facilities.
And even where a community does manage to connect and start up donor generation, a further question arises: who will handle the electricity-market operations that the new unit entails?
Unused connection capacity is an asset that can be monetised through energy projects. There are several routes: obtain equipment from a donor, take out a bank loan, or run an investment tender inviting private companies to build the generation themselves. Delivering an energy project on the back of a municipal utility's existing connection capacity makes financial sense, because it saves on distribution and transmission charges.
Donor equipment breeds inefficiency
The key questions when building new generation are what to install and where to connect it, because the answers can decide the economic fate of the new facility. If it becomes clear along the way that the connection would leave the generation uncompetitive, then it is worth asking why it is being built at all.
When community representatives receive donor equipment, they do not weigh the project's economics the way they would if they had bought it themselves. That is how so many inefficient decisions come about.
If a community first defined its needs and then offered its sites and connection points to private business, that could change the picture substantially. But this route will not be a quick one, because there is no trust between the stakeholders.
No community leader wants to be the first to run a joint project with business. Central government could help – by setting up a platform on Prozorro, Ukraine's public procurement system, where a community offers a site and a connection and private companies pick the project they want to take on.
Ukrenergo's investment tenders are a positive example, because they give companies a ready business model. Even there, though, there are wrinkles: Ukrenergo still treats the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions as energy-surplus, relying on 2021 data – that is, counting in the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and 7 GW of grid-connection permits issued for power plants in territories that are now occupied. This affects whether new generation in these regions can obtain a connection at all.
The corporate reform that never happened
Even as the Ukrainian authorities try to encourage decentralised generation, the energy sector still consists largely of big state-owned companies.
Ukraine's biggest problem in managing state-owned enterprises is an excess of temporary rules, international partners point out. The temporary procedure for selecting supervisory-board members, for example, has been used to reboot those boards by hand – largely without a nomination committee or any foreign participation. This practice needs to go, argues UAFP's analytical note "From сhanging names to practical solutions: rules-based management as the benchmark of corporate governance reform".
