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Volodymyr Zelenskyy may have failed to persuade EU leaders to hand over frozen Russian assets to Ukraine \u2014 but his government will nonetheless receive a financial lifeline of \u20ac90bn, under a deal hammered out in the small hours of this morning in Brussels.<\/p>\n
A big chunk of that money will need to go towards shoring up Ukraine\u2019s teetering energy system, which is now coming under another intensifying wave of attacks from Russia as winter draws in. And investment in grid-level battery storage \u2014 which has been surging globally this year to complement renewable power generation \u2014 will play a particularly central role in Ukraine, as I explore below.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll be off for Christmas and the new year, returning to your inbox on Wednesday, January 7. We wish you all a great end-of-year break \u2014 ahead of what is likely to be another very eventful 12 months.<\/p>\n
Start-up life in Ukraine has its downsides, Andrii Bondar concedes.<\/p>\n
Nearly four years into Russia\u2019s all-out invasion, the war has had a devastating effect on the national economy, with relentless aerial attacks pummelling infrastructure and claiming thousands of civilian lives. Ukrainian GDP this year is forecast to be about a fifth lower than in 2021.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s perhaps not surprising, Bondar reflects, that many of his fellow entrepreneurs have moved to the US or calmer parts of Europe, rather than struggle to raise venture funding in a country at war.<\/p>\n
But Bondar\u2019s own sector of the Ukrainian economy is undergoing something of a boom. His start-up, R.Flo, is developing a battery technology that uses chemical reactions of iron salts to store and release energy.<\/p>\n
Investment in grid-level power storage has been surging in Ukraine over the past year, from previously negligible levels, in a crucial part of national efforts to build a grid more resilient against attack.<\/p>\n
Russian aerial strikes or occupation have now knocked out the majority of Ukraine\u2019s coal, gas and nuclear generation, which provided the vast bulk of the country\u2019s power before the conflict. In contrast, solar power capacity \u2014 far less vulnerable to missiles than bulky thermal power plants \u2014 has continued to grow.<\/p>\n
This has resulted in frequent large electricity surpluses on sunny days \u2014 followed by huge deficits that plunge swaths of the country into darkness. It makes for a chaotic crisis situation \u2014\u00a0but also, as Bondar points out, \u201ca great market for arbitrage\u201d, as wholesale electricity prices sink to near-zero before surging to extortionate levels at night.<\/p>\n
Companies are now moving at an accelerating pace to tackle this opportunity, a trend that could yield them hefty returns while shoring up the country\u2019s battered electricity system.<\/p>\n
The investment surge was triggered in August last year when the national grid operator Ukrenergo launched a system of auctions for grid-level power storage. Since then, about half a gigawatt of battery storage investment has been announced. That\u2019s equivalent to roughly 2 per cent of Ukraine\u2019s currently operational grid generation capacity \u2014 already a high ratio by international standards. By comparison, Germany has about 2.3GW of grid-level battery storage installed, on a grid with generation capacity of over 250GW.<\/p>\n
And some of these Ukrainian battery installations are being developed at unusual speed. Witness a 200-megawatt battery project that was brought online in September by Ukraine\u2019s DTEK, in partnership with US-based Fluence, a joint venture of Siemens and AES. That project was completed in six months, compared with a typical timeframe of two years for installations of similar scale, according to the developers.<\/p>\n
The government is targeting still faster growth in storage, accompanying a wider goal of doubling the country\u2019s renewable energy consumption from 2023 levels by 2030. To pursue that goal, it will lean heavily on support from foreign development finance bodies, which have been giving a crucial push to the battery drive.<\/p>\n
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development last month announced a loan for a battery storage project by Ukrainian company Power One. The World Bank has provided financing to support a 197MW storage project by state-owned power company Ukrhydroenergo. R.Flo, meanwhile, is among the beneficiaries of InnovateUkraine, a \u00a333mn ($45mn) programme funded by the UK government to support low-carbon innovation in the country.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also received investment from Kness Group, a renewable energy company that\u2019s now among the country\u2019s biggest investors in grid-level storage. Kness Group \u2014 where the R.Flo team started developing its technology before spinning out into a separate company\u00a0\u2014 is betting that the start-up\u2019s iron-based approach could offer a more cost-effective way of storing energy for longer periods than the lithium-ion batteries that currently dominate this field.<\/p>\n
Ukraine\u2019s grid-level storage needs will keep increasing, Kness chief executive Sergii Shakalov told me, as the country continues to shift towards renewable power sources that might be intermittent but are more secure against attack. \u201cRussia keeps striking our gas systems,\u201d Shakalov said. \u201cBut Russia can\u2019t stop the wind and can\u2019t stop the sun.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sudden succession <\/strong>What lay behind the sudden exit of BP boss Murray Auchincloss \u2014 and who is Meg O\u2019Neill, the former ExxonMobil executive chosen to succeed him?<\/p>\n High hopes <\/strong>\u201cWe have people begging me to do this,\u201d Donald Trump said as he signed an order loosening restrictions on marijuana. But shares in cannabis companies plunged, amid a sell-off by investors who had expected Trump to go further.<\/p>\n The Climate Graphic: Explained<\/strong> \u2014 Understanding the most important climate data of the week. Sign up here<\/p>\n The AI Shift<\/strong> \u2014 John Burn-Murdoch and Sarah O\u2019Connor dive into how AI is transforming the world of work. Sign up here<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This article is an on-site version of our Moral Money newsletter. Premium subscribers can sign up here to get the newsletter delivered twice a week. Standard subscribers can upgrade to Premium here, or explore all FT newsletters. Visit our Moral Money hub for all the latest ESG news, opinion and analysis from around the FT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38243,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[651,710,4371,13344],"class_list":{"0":"post-38242","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-battery","9":"tag-boom","10":"tag-ukraines","11":"tag-wartime"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/38243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended newsletters for you<\/h3>\n