By Isabel Coles and Jenny Strasburg | Photographs and videos by Serhii Korovayny for WSJ
For months, workers battled to keep the decades-old power station in the front-line city of Kurakhove functioning as advancing Russian forces hammered it with artillery.
In the spring, the mission changed. Their new Herculean task: to dismantle the entire facility -- with increasing urgency. Its generators, transformers and other vital parts were desperately needed to repair other Ukrainian power stations ravaged by Russian attacks.
"It was of course very difficult," said the power station's boss, Anatoliy Borichevskiy, who delivered the news in the spring to the site's 1,000 workers, many of whom grew up in the industrial town dominated by the plant. "We had no choice."
Alongside battlefield setbacks, Ukraine faces another major test as the war enters its third winter: keeping the lights on. In the spring, Russia launched a fresh onslaught against Ukraine's energy infrastructure, targeting several power plants in a tactical shift aimed at eroding the country's ability to sustain the war effort.
Wave after wave of missiles and drones knocked out about half of Ukraine's power-generation capacity, triggering blackouts and disrupting businesses that rely on steady electricity. Winter will put even greater strain on the energy system as colder temperatures drive up demand for electricity. In the worst case, lengthy power outages could make Ukraine's cities unlivable in the months to come, spurring a new exodus from the country.
The looming energy crunch has thrust companies such as DTEK to the center of a mission crucial to the country's war effort. As the country's largest private energy company, DTEK operates the Kurakhove plant and before the full-scale invasion typically supplied about one-quarter of the country's electricity.
The quest has involved scavenging decommissioned power stations across Europe for replacement parts, and shuttle diplomacy stretching from Brussels and Berlin to Washington.
But even willing partners with spare Soviet-era parts have needed months to cut through bureaucracies -- their own national energy ministries and in some cases private investors -- before they can get enough of those parts into Ukraine's hands.
As freezing temperatures have drawn closer, Ukraine found the quickest fix within its borders -- the cannibalization of its own power assets in a massive reshuffling aimed at patching together what it can, as quickly as possible.
"This is the main source of equipment," said DTEK Chief Executive Maxim Timchenko. "We had no choice."
Two years of war had taught Timchenko to prepare for the worst, but the scale of the destruction was overwhelming. Previous attacks on substations and transformers had kept crews busy with repairs, but Russia's targeting of hydroelectric and thermal plants meant larger-scale destruction to complex facilities that take years to build.
In a span of weeks in the spring, about 80% of DTEK's generation capacity was wiped out.
"I could never have imagined it would happen," said Timchenko. In a video he filmed amid the wreckage of one plant, mangled remains smolder in a turbine hall ripped open by a missile.
Efforts to restore power began as soon as the flames were extinguished. DTEK pulled in coal miners, electricians and other employees from different parts of the company to help clear the rubble.
But some equipment was irreparably damaged, and much of it couldn't be bought off the shelf. Waiting months for scarce new equipment wasn't an option.
A solution emerged unexpectedly when Russia destroyed a bridge used to feed the Kurakhove power station with coal. Without it, the plant couldn't function, but rebuilding infrastructure so close to the front line was out of the question.
After discussions with senior management, Borichevskiy gathered workers in the control room to break the news: The plant to which many had devoted their entire lives would be stripped down for spare parts.
"People were saying: 'How could you do this?'" Borichevskiy recalled.
There was no time to waste. Russian troops were less than 4 miles away and edging closer. All workers set to the task of dismantling the power station. The question was how. "We'd never done this before," he said.
Equipment weighing hundreds of tons would have to be transported by road because the only rail link to the plant was destroyed. The transformers were so heavy that they broke the hydraulic pushers used to move them. One crane was too weak to lift some pieces of equipment, so workers used two at once, with thick ropes often "snapping like thread," Borichevskiy said.
Tires burst as some of the equipment was loaded onto trucks, as did vehicle suspensions. Workers reinforced bridges to keep them from buckling.
While Borichevskiy grappled with the task, executives at DTEK were scouring countries, including former Soviet republics, for spare parts.
Timchenko met with energy ministers from countries including Bulgaria, Romania and Greece for their help to get private and state-owned companies on board. But many of those conversations hit dead ends and others have dragged on, as did planning for security and logistics.
Gradually, DTEK was bringing power units back online, but each time, Russia struck again. Unless Ukraine's energy infrastructure was properly shielded from enemy bombardment, repairs would be in vain.
"We were doing so much to restore these plants," Timchenko said. "It's not easy to keep ourselves motivated."
In late-summer meetings, Timchenko said, U.S. officials asked what they could do to help Ukraine prepare for the winter. Separating the most desperate, immediate needs from the longer term, he told them: "We don't need financial assistance. We don't even need equipment. What we need is air defense."
In regular crisis-response meetings, Timchenko received updates about repairs and a grim head count of employees killed or wounded on the front lines. More than 320 DTEK employees have died in the war, mostly while fighting. Another 1,000-plus have been injured.
"He's emotionally involved," says Henrik Andersen, chief executive of Danish wind-turbine maker Vestas, who speaks frequently with Timchenko. "He can see that in his employees, and in his leaders, they are working tirelessly to make the country run."
Despite the war, the two companies have pushed ahead with plans to build the biggest wind farm in Eastern Europe on Ukrainian territory, part of a broader effort to make the country's energy system more resilient by dispersing power generation. But those efforts wouldn't help with the approaching winter.
Meanwhile, the DTEK boss grappled with constraints around servicing the company's debt due to restrictions on cross-border currency transfers. DTEK has said its trading arm would import liquefied natural gas from the U.S. in the coming months to help Ukraine and neighboring countries with winter gas supplies.
By late summer, the operation to strip Kurakhove was largely complete. Parts repurposed from Kurakhove have been significant in helping DTEK restore damaged capacity. The company has restored about 60% of capacity from before this year's attacks, from a low of around 10%.
DTEK's engineers have gotten creative finding ways to combine equipment that wasn't built to work together. Despite those efforts and power imports from Europe, the International Energy Agency has warned that Ukraine could end up 6 gigawatts short of the electricity it needs for the coldest days of winter, or about a third of projected peak demand.
If winter is mild, Ukraine could avoid major nationwide blackouts, said Oleksandr Kharchenko, director at the Energy Industry Research Center, a Kyiv-based think tank. "Of course, if it will be minus 10, minus 15 Celsius, especially for two to three weeks, we will need some restrictions," he said. That is assuming Russia does no further major damage to its power infrastructure.
At the Kurakhove plant, everything is gone but the boilers and other parts are too unwieldy to transport. Among the items Borichevskiy salvaged was a photo album -- warped and stained with age -- containing sepia images of the plant under construction in the 1930s, with steam-powered excavators and horse-drawn carts.
DTEK executives say they haven't given up on the plant and plan to restore it when circumstances allow -- but with Russian forces advancing, it is unlikely to be soon.
Many workers transferred to other power stations. Others stayed behind for months to care for elderly relatives or were simply unwilling to leave their hometown. In recent weeks, the government has told citizens to leave.
"Now we are all scattered in different parts of Ukraine," said Borichevskiy.
Write to Isabel Coles at isabel.coles@wsj.com and Jenny Strasburg at jenny.strasburg@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 10, 2024 23:00 ET (04:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments