The ingenious Sun Tzu said that strategy without tactics is a slow path to victory, and tactics without strategy is vanity before defeat.
The presence of a strategy is difficult to overestimate. Countries that do not have a strategy are a resource for countries that do.
But let me remind you that all sectoral strategies, including the energy one, are parts of the overall planning system. Therefore, first, strategic plans of the highest level of the hierarchy are drawn up, and only then - sectoral and territorial strategies.
It is impossible to build an energy strategy without understanding what we have with demography, what will happen to our economy, what promising value chains we have, how we will distribute production capacities across the country, where our markets are, and so on. The energy industry needs to get a list of tasks to complete. Only then does the energy strategy itself make sense.
What do we have for today?
On April 21, 2023, by Order No. 373-r, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine unexpectedly approved the Energy Strategy of Ukraine until 2050 and out of harm's way so that "energy volunteers" like me would not poke their nose into it, it was classified .
( the text itself can not be searched - it is not in the public domain )
And everything would be at least visually within the bounds of decency, but over the past two months after the approval of the strategy ... they continue to make changes to it!!!
Yes, yes - you heard it right - in the building of the Ministry of Energy of Ukraine on the street. Khreshchatyk 30, on the 3rd floor, in office No. 305, on the computer of the state secretary of the ministry Sergey Nikolayevich Suyarko, characters of various kinds, after agreement, continued to finish their versions of the Strategy. The amended text of the Strategy, in addition to the main official submission, was sent to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine at least five more times - on April 20, April 21, April 25, April 26 and May 1. Who knows, maybe the process is still going on... it's still secret, so no one knows what was there before...
Separately, it should be noted that now the provisions of the Strategy are not consistent even with the Report on the assessment of the conformity (sufficiency) of generating capacities, which was approved on April 11, 2023, that is, simultaneously .
Therefore, due to the fact that there is no final version of the Strategy at the time of the release of this post of mine and is not expected, I will analyze the initial version - the one that went to the Cabinet of Ministers for official approval.
Let's start with the main one - Ukraine's GDP - the authors of the Strategy predict:
" ... it is expected that the GDP indicator in 2023 will be 396 billion dollars and will further grow by 65% until 2032 and by 148% until 2050 ... that is, the Ukrainian economy is expected to grow at the level of 5% in 2025- 2032 and by 2.3% in 2032-2050..."
Official data indicate that in dollar terms Ukraine's GDP for 2022 amounted to about $159 billion, respectively, in 2023 it will be no more than $176 billion. In 2023, the plus/minus figure is correlated. Per capita at parity, we have $11,100 (2022) and $13,700 (2023). But there is a nuance - if in 2022 we had 31.5 million people, then in 2023, according to the forecast, there will be only 28.5 million of us, that is, "minus 3 million." Further demographic dynamics is negative, therefore, in the absence of comprehensive planning for high-quality advanced development, most likely we will simply go with the flow ...
Further, the esteemed authors of the Strategy state that:
"... electricity consumption will amount to 7,409 thousand tons in oil equivalent in 2023, and by 2050 this figure will increase by another 3.2 times ..."
That is, the authors of the Strategy measure electricity consumption not in terms of kilowatt-hours understandable to all mortals, but as in "the best houses of Landon" - in tons of oil equivalent. At the same time, from the very beginning, everything is presented in such a way as to confuse everyone, because for each type of resource and technology efficiency, these equivalents are calculated separately, which can even be found on Wikipedia
Well, if we select the conversion factor "1 toe = 11,630 kWh" from this list (apparently, this is what the Strategy meant), then the forecast electricity consumption for 2023 (7,409 thousand toe e.) will be equal to 86,167 billion kWh. But this figure is not clear at all, because developers should be aware that in 2022 electricity consumption (gross) in Ukraine amounted to 109.9 billion kWh, the balance for 2023 approved on May 2, 2023 provides for consumption (gross) at the level of 106 .1 billion kWh, and the expected consumption (gross) for 2023 today is 105.9 billion kWh.
Where did 20 billion kWh go in 2023?
Regarding the prospective production of electricity in the Strategy, we have the following picture:
" ... in 2025 - 135.2 billion kWh, and in 2050 - 333.7 billion kWh ... " .
At the same time, we do not understand from the word "absolutely" what consumption structure and what volume we will have in the coming years.
In the energy system, domestic generation equals domestic consumption plus exports. And if we are talking about the fact that our exports are growing 10 times, then show where we are "pushing out" energy, because Ohm's and Kirchhoff's laws must be fulfilled in the electrical network. And in order to "push out" we need to multiply the throughput of the external network interface, that is, to implement a large number of projects of interstate interconnectors worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
And finally, in 2050, according to the Strategy, we will already be exclusively carbon-neutral, so the growth in demand for electricity will be covered exclusively by carbon-neutral sources, including nuclear generation.
In addition to understandable measures such as the return of the Zaporozhye NPP to the Unified Energy System of Ukraine until 2025 (why not in 2023?), the extension of the operating life of the existing NPP power units, the completion of the KhNPP-3.4 on one technology (it is not known which one), the construction of the KhNPP-5.6 (preliminarily at Westinghouse AP1000 reactors), an additional hundred of small modular reactors (SMRs) are planned to be built, with a pilot project until 2029. In one of my posts " Small modular nuclear New Vasyuki " I separately noted why this is impossible and how it actually works.
Do we have a match in the activities proposed in the Strategy? Did its developers actually think in terms of energy balances, regimes, maximum/minimum loads, the need to balance the generation of a stochastic nature, external interfaces? The questions are, of course, rhetorical...
But what exactly the Strategy has a lot of is smart networks, a decrease in the SAIDI indicator, comprehensive integration and a lot of things dear to the heart of the voter. That is, instead of the Strategy, another memoir was created "for all the good things" and "so that no one thinks anything."
We need a strategy for a country that has defeated Russia and taken its place in Europe's energy mix. We need a strategy for the European economic tiger, the new leader of Western Eurasia - the new Ukraine that we will build.
And this is a strategy of decline, primarily intellectual.