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Start free trial →Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change · Climate & Energy · November 2026
Asked what other countries should learn from Ukraine's wartime grid, the former head of Ukraine's grid operator argues that small, modular plants beat large centralised ones on both resilience and speed of build, and ties that to meeting demand from AI data centres.
My guess was close to that.
…which is about cleaning up the corruption and then all the scandal and then teaching the international investors. But what do the energy sectors outside Ukraine need to learn from your experience through the conflict, through four and a half years, or through any other aspect of what you're doing?
I strongly believe that the era of big power plants is gone. It's gone not only for security reasons, because you can face this sabotage acts in every country in Europe in the world, and the enemy can take down a large portion of your generation assets in one go if you centralize your generation too much. But also it's economically more viable, even if you take the rollout time to build a large combined cycle heating plant. You would need probably four to five years. You can roll out smaller facilities in six to eight months. And this type of new smaller modular generation units combined with battery energy systems with controlled demand or maneuverable demand, this network of power plants resembles internet. You cannot switch on one server to switch it on completely. And the resilience of the system, but also affordability of the system is much higher. It's probably a future of all energy systems because if we need to match, for example, the AI boom, how do we build the generation adequate to this growth of consumption? We cannot use nuclear for that because we would be building 10 years or 15 years of one nuclear unit. So we need something very quick, very modular, very maneuverable, very flexible. And this is a combination of…
were doing so well. I agreed with that system until you mentioned hydrogen. Until you mentioned hydrogen. But we're not going to go there. We're out of time. Thank you next
time. I agree that hydrogen is not commercially viable. So I'm just saying at some point of time. You
were teasing me. I know you were teasing me. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. So that was Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, former CEO of Ukrenago and co-founder of NiGen. And before him, we heard from Vitalii Zaichenko, the current chair and CEO of Ukrenago. My sincere thanks to both of them for…