In mid-February last year, the media reported that the Ministry of Communities, Territories and Infrastructure, together with Ukrenergo, was implementing a pilot project to build two 330 kV and 750 kV trunk substations protected from missile and drone attacks. They say that by last winter, the two substations should have been in underground bunkers.
It is not known whether the so-called “bunkers” were eventually built, but both Kubrakov, who was the Minister of Infrastructure at the time of this alleged statement, and Kudrytskyi, the then head of Ukrenergo, have already been fired.
Just as Mustafa Nayem, then head of the State Agency for Infrastructure Restoration and Development, was fired, as he said in January this year that the agency plans to build three levels of protection for all 22 Ukrainian energy facilities by 2024.
Such protection is usually steel and concrete bunkers buried or semi-submerged in the ground.
However, as a result, there are no facilities with this level of protection in Ukraine. At least recently, the current Prime Minister of Ukraine, Denys Shmyhal, said that Ukraine would build only 1-2 shelters of the third level of protection for energy facilities at the first stage, which is close to completion.
“We have agreed (with international partners – ed.) to carry out conservation where construction has begun, leave 1-2 closest to completion, and complete them, see how they work, and decide how we will complete all the others,” he said.
Oleksiy Kucherenko, First Deputy Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Energy, Housing and Utilities, said in an exclusive commentary to Kommersant Ukrainsky that announcing the start of construction of underground shelters and then not completing the job is a state crime.
“The government and the prime minister talked about it, but they were very much mistaken. Shmyhal, Kubrakov and Nayem with these underground shelters for transformer substations. And now it has turned out that there is no money for this and no one else will give it. And the cost of one transformer substation facility is about UAH 15 billion. They started building 7 of them and never finished any of them, mothballed everything and froze huge funds. I consider this a state crime,” Kucherenko said.
In his opinion, the construction of underground thermal power plants is just a theory.
“We can only talk about this in theory. Two dictators, Stalin and Hitler, built underground factories and production facilities, but they had unlimited human and financial resources. Today it is impossible to imagine this.”
“It is possible to hide some essential components, such as distribution transformer substations, if the project does not include the entire plant, but some essential components, such as distribution transformer substations. There are such stations in Ukraine, I won’t name them. These are the stations that have withstood very powerful blows and their transformers have not been destroyed,” Kucherenko said.
In his opinion, today there is no question of transferring generating capacities at all.
“Just like we are not talking about relocating cable power lines. They are very expensive, it takes a lot of money and time,” said the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Energy, Housing and Utilities.