Electricity Market Reform in Ukraine: What Is at Stake?

7 May 2020, 5pm CEST

In the shadows of the Corona crisis, Ukraine witnesses a power battle around the future of the energy reform pathway of the country. The first move of the new acting head of the Ministry of Energy and Environmental protection was to adjust planned electricity balance for 2020, prescribing load reduction for nuclear power plants and opening more space for coal power plants to operate, while the population of many Ukrainian cities and regions suffers from dangerous levels of air pollution amid COVID-19 pandemic. This signals potential aggravation of the health and environmental crisis in Ukraine and raises public concerns.

While the ousted minister for Energy and Environmental Protection had declared a "Green energy transition until 2050" with commitment to reforms and decarbonisation, the new government led by Prime Minister Shmygal seems to roll back into old patterns of energy sector governance by vested interests of leading oligarchs under the pretext of crisis management. The plans for a rearrangement of the electricity market clearly favor interests of the business group of Rinat Akhmetov.

With our speakers we would like to shed more light on the current developments in the Ukrainian electricity sector and list implications for the reform agenda agreed with the European Union.

Is Ukraine ready to connect to the EU's Green Deal Agenda and to define a credible decarbonisation strategy?  What are the interests behind the planned changes of the electricity market design? Where are the effective checks and balances in Ukrainian energy governance?

Expert inputs:

• Oleg Savitskiy, NGO “Ecoaction”, Kyiv
• Olena Pavlenko, Analytical center DiXi Group, President, Kyiv
• Sergiy Maslichenko, Former Deputy Minister of Energy and Environment in Ukraine, Kyiv
• Torsten Wöllert, European Commission, Support Group for Ukraine, Brussels 

Commentary:

• Viola von Cramon, Member of European Parliament, Brussels

Moderation: Robert Sperfeld, Heinrich Boell Foundation, Berlin

Latest related Posts:

Fact Sheet: Ukraine and EU: Towards a Decarbonisation Partnership

Kostiantyn Krynytskyi, Oleh Savytksyi: A Turning Point for Ukraine: Full-Scale Energy Transition or Reestablished Gas Dependency?

Oleh Savytksyi: What is in store for Ukraine: decarbonization or monopolization?

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