More than 24,000 households in Ukraine use solar power systems to meet their electricity needs, reported the State Agency for Energy Efficiency and Energy Saving. The PV systems installed have a total capacity of 618 megawatts (MW), and the total investment is about 495 million euros.
“As we can see, more and more ordinary citizens are getting involved in the production of clean energy,” reads the Agency’s statement.
In particular, in the first quarter of 2020, over 2,100 systems where installed, with a total capacity of 65 MW, 50 per cent more than the same quarter of 2019.
“In addition, people are driven by the opportunity to save on electricity bills, not depending on any energy provider and to be more energy-efficient,” the statement continues.
The top five Ukrainian regions in terms of the number of installed PV systems include Dnipropetrovsk region (3,200), Ternopil region (over 2,200), Kyiv region (almost 2,000), Ivano-Frankivsk region (over 1,800), and Zakarpattia region (over 1,400).
In total, more than 24,000 PV systems allow households to generate over 0.7 gigawatts per hour (GWh) of clean electricity per year. For comparison, this amount of electricity is enough for about 230,000 families.
Early in April, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) reported that the renewable energy sector added 176 GW of generating capacity globally last year with Central and Eastern Europe’s renewable growing by 11 per cent outpacing the average European growth rate of 6.5 per cent.
In particular, IRENA mentioned Ukraine as an outstanding country within the region. The country’s sharp increase in RES capacities comes as the government has committed to ramping up renewables from around 4 per cent of the country’s energy mix today, to 25 per cent by 2035. Much of this growth in solar and wind as well has been fuelled by a rush to secure the Green Tariff, which is to be replaced by an auction-based regime from this year.
