VK Volodymyr Kudrytskyi On Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

“We are building decentralized generation not only because it's economically more viable, but also because decentralization provides for less war risk. You can only get insurance if you have a physically diversified portfolio of assets. Nobody would insure a 2,200 megawatt battery in Ukraine. It's obvious.”

Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change · Climate & Energy · November 2026

Context

Asked whether he went small and distributed to avoid dealing with the transmission operator, he answers that it is about insurability: spreading assets out is how a project in a war zone gets war-risk cover.

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Transcript

Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change Around 46:17 into the episode

Volodymyr Kudrytskyi

Well, this power plants that we are building are too small to be connected to 330 kilowatts.

Michael Liebreich

But you could have built much bigger ones.

Volodymyr Kudrytskyi

We are building decentralized generation not only because it's economically more viable, but also because this decentralization also provides for less war risk. So you can only get insurance if you have a diversified, physically diversified portfolio of assets. Nobody would insure 2200 megawatt battery in Ukraine. It's obvious. So this is a way how to avoid to a certain extent the inherent war risk that we have here. Okay,

Michael Liebreich

so I'm failing to challenge you properly on your business model because I agree with you. Sorry for that. And I tried to segue to talk about Ukraine. So let's do that directly though. So your time at Ukraine came to, did it come to a premature end? It was controversial. It's in the news. So can I…

Volodymyr Kudrytskyi

It was a political decision of the president. I was probably not the most comfortable counterparty to him. We did not agree in many things. And especially, I proposed this decentralized generation concept in the early 2023. So right after the first winter in war, right after the first time we…

Michael Liebreich

be clear, you were the CEO of the transmission grid and you were saying, don't do the transmission grid, connect stuff to the distribution grids.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

“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.” — Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

“I strongly believe that the era of big power plants is gone. It's gone not only for security reasons, because you can face these sabotage acts in every country in the world, and the enemy can take down a large portion of your generation assets in one go if you centralize too much. But it's also economically more viable. To build a large combined cycle plant you would need four to five years; you can roll out smaller facilities in six to eight months.” — Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change