“Around 50% of their centralized coal and combined heat and power generation has been taken out through Russian strikes. But only 7% of their distributed generation. So you can see how that very centralized Soviet architecture is remarkably vulnerable.”
Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change · Climate & Energy · November 2026
Context
Michael Liebreich asked how much Ukraine's power system has changed over the war. Parsons contrasts what survived Russian attacks and says Ukraine responded by putting flexible, distributed generation close to demand, a lesson he thinks Europe is ignoring.
Transcript
…not been an energy system, certainly a modern energy system anywhere in the world that's had to structurally change as quickly as Ukraine's had. Last year alone, I think they had 50,000 drones and 1,800 missiles fired at their energy system. I mean, that is just an extraordinary amount. It's
amazing that they have any lights on or any heat flowing at all, really.
It really is. And they've had to adapt continually. It's been this constant game of cat and mouse. I think when we think about resilience, we often think about an event, a bad thing happening, and we have to recover. But Ukraine never gets the chance to recover. They have to continually adapt and reroute and find ways around the problem. But different parts of their system have fared differently. So, for example, around 50% of their centralized coal and combined heat and power generation has been taken away. That's been taken out through Russian strikes. But only 7% of their distributed generation. So you can see how that very centralized Soviet architecture is remarkably vulnerable. And what Ukraine have done is respond by putting distributed, flexible, either gas turbines or renewables or batteries. And they've put that as close to the centers of demand as possible. And they thought about where there's critical load they need to keep running, have a much more integrated way of thinking about resilience and the architecture of their…
It's things like the things that we could easily do. So for instance, instead of building one big power station, we could make it modular. But when you make it modular, you might also want to think about separating it distance-wise and also putting infrastructure, sort of concrete, what can I say…
we're now approaching this clean power investment we're doing in the UK, for example. And all across Europe, we're doing our energy transition. So in the UK, I think it's around £40 billion a year we're going to spend on energy over just the next five years. And those investments will lock in the…
just for clarity, Dixie Group think tank based in Kyiv doing lots of work around the economic challenges associated with this conflict.
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