“Today we had a price of one Ukrainian cent at 12 o'clock. In the evening it was 15 hryvnias, so 1,500 times higher. So you cannot currently build the system purely on wind and solar, because it would collapse. When I build one megawatt of flexible gas generation, I substitute 10 megawatts of coal generation. Why? Because my gas piston machine can be switched on in six minutes and switched off in two seconds, while a large coal-fired power plant cannot do that.”
Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change · Climate & Energy · November 2026
Context
The host had pushed back that Ukraine should simply build more solar and wind. Kudrytskyi describes the daily price swings on Ukraine's power market, with a midday solar glut and a steep evening peak, and why flexible gas is needed to balance it.
Transcript
…because you would need batteries of the capacity that you would not like as an investor. If you build only solar, you will go bankrupt because in Ukraine the payback would be probably, I don't know, 15 to 20 years if you sell to the market because as I said, it's a surplus of solar. But whenever
it's sunny, the price goes to the center. The price goes to one
Ukrainian cent. Today, we had a price of one Ukrainian cent in 12 o'clock, 12 a.m. In the evening, it was 15 grivnos, so it was like 1.5 thousand times higher. So basically, you cannot currently build the system purely based on wind and solar because it would collapse. And what is happening with gas in Ukraine, for example? When I build one megawatt of gas, flexible gas generation, I substitute 10 megawatts of coal generation. Why? Because my gas piston machine can be switched on in six minutes and can be switched off in two seconds, while large coal-fired power plant cannot do that. It has a range of maneuverability in like 80% to 100%. So during night, when the price is low, coal-fired power plant is in operation. They are burning coal all the time. So I can replace that by wind or nuclear if I introduce more gas into the system and allow to switch off this coal-fired power plant forever by covering only morning and evening peaks. And this is exactly what we do.
I'm smiling because we covered this exactly in the episode with the head of actually was Vatila's energy business about Chile. 25% coal gets replaced with 4% gas. So according to that.
My guess was close to that.
I want to finish with one final question, which is about what other countries need to learn from this experience. So you say international, you know, you talked about accelerating here, which is about cleaning up the corruption and then all the scandal and then teaching the international investors.…
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