A persistent problem has emerged on Ukraine’s wholesale electricity market that, according to experts, has ceased to be a matter of current price dynamics and has turned into a systemic barrier to the recovery of the power system. The issue is price caps — the maximum prices for electricity for businesses, which the regulator changes periodically without any clear or predictable logic. According to former Ukrenergo head Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, as stated in an interview on Apostrof TV and reported by RBC-Ukraine, it is precisely this unpredictability that has become the main factor driving private investors away from investing in the new generation of power plants.
Unpredictability as the main enemy of investment
Kudrytskyi explained that the regulator operates on an “on–off” principle: at one moment the price “ceiling” is raised, allowing imported electricity from Europe to enter the Ukrainian market, and at another it is sharply lowered. The expert gave specific examples: the cap price can fall from 10 to 5 hryvnias per kilowatt-hour, or from 15 to 8 hryvnias. “You can’t predict that tomorrow someone will wake up on the wrong side of the bed and the cap price, say, will be lowered — that is simply impossible to predict,” he emphasized. For an investor who calculates the payback period of a new power plant over a horizon of ten years or more, such swings render any financial model meaningless.
From prices to generation: a systemic effect on the power system
According to Kudrytskyi, the price cap problem goes far beyond current tariffs for consumers. Unpredictable rules directly affect the willingness of the private sector to invest in the new generation of power plants — without which, the expert stresses, it is impossible to quickly restore the resilience of the power system. “In such a situation, of course, this creates enormous uncertainty for attracting the very investments that are the key to restoring the resilience of our power system and our energy independence,” the former head of Ukrenergo stated. He added that building hundreds and thousands of small power plants solely with the resources of state companies is physically impossible, which makes attracting the private sector and establishing predictable rules in the energy market not an option but a necessity.
The European approach versus manual control
An alternative to the current model was previously outlined by Volodymyr Omelchenko, Director of Energy Programs at the Razumkov Centre. In his assessment, Ukraine has the technical capacity to import up to 2.5 GW of electricity, however the current approach to setting price caps does not allow this resource to be fully utilized during periods of shortage. Omelchenko advocated for setting cap prices in line with European principles — that is, through market mechanisms rather than manual administrative regulation. It was also previously noted that without a review of price caps, Ukraine will face significantly greater difficulty importing electricity in the winter period, when the load on the grid is at its maximum.
Context: from spring outages to winter risks
The link between price caps and the reliability of power supply has already been confirmed in practice. As Kudrytskyi previously stated, the lowering of cap prices became one of the causes of the mass electricity outages in the spring of 2026, while the return of strict price caps triggered a new wave of blackouts. Thus, the problem that the expert describes in terms of investment attractiveness is already being felt in everyday life — in the form of power cuts for millions of consumers. According to the combined expert assessments, establishing a stable, predictable pricing policy on the wholesale market is becoming not just a question of economic efficiency, but a condition of the country’s energy security ahead of the next heating season.
