Ukrainian energy has faced a serious systemic crisis that threatens the country's transition to market tracks. The main problem, according to experts, remains chronic debts on the balancing market. This situation not only creates financial difficulties but also blocks the development of the entire industry, including the renewable energy sector.
"Zoo" of Temporary Solutions
The head of the Ukrainian Association of Renewable Energy (UARE) Olga Evstigneeva, in a conversation with RBC-Ukraine, outlined the scale of the problem. According to her, the balancing market has been operating in a mode of accumulating arrears for years. This has led to the fact that the system has ceased to work as originally intended.
Instead of transparent market mechanisms that should regulate consumption and generation, the country is forced to maintain complex temporary solutions. The expert called the current situation a "zoo of PSO" (enterprises with special conditions), which must be overcome to implement systematic market rules.
"This market is chronically in debt, and this is a very big problem. And therefore, today we will also defend this position in order to move away from this, so to speak, existing "zoo of PSO" and implement some systematic market mechanisms," emphasized Evstigneeva.
Threat to "Green" Energy
The problem of debts is not limited to the narrow segment of the balancing market. It has a cascading effect and directly affects the development of renewable energy (RE). For the normal functioning of the power system, it is necessary that different segments work as a single mechanism.
In the opinion of the chairman of UARE, to solve the task it is necessary to simultaneously develop renewable generation and implement energy storage systems. Only such a comprehensive approach will allow to eliminate market deviations and successfully integrate the Ukrainian power system with the European one.
"The problem of debts exists both on the balancing market and can appear on the RE market. And all these market deviations are a task for us to solve them and to successfully unite with Europe," noted the expert.
Who is to blame for the debts?
The causes of the debts do not lie in the plane of technical failures or errors in network management. Earlier, the director of the Energy Research Center, Alexander Kharchenko, pointed to the real culprit of the situation. According to his data, the debt is formed due to the activities of "critical" enterprises.
These objects continue to consume electricity on an industrial scale, but for years have not been able to pay for the supplied resource. It is this imbalance between consumption and payment that creates a hole in the budget of the balancing market, putting the stability of the entire energy system of Ukraine at risk.
