Ukrainian investment company Dragon Capital, the Nedzhen company, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) signed a Mandate Letter for the Power One project, outlining plans for a potential €21.1 million ($24.5 million) loan to support the development of distributed power generation in Ukraine.
The Mandate Letter was signed on July 10 in Rome, during the Ukrainian Recovery Conference, former Ukrenergo CEO Volodymyr Kudrytskyi said Tuesday, July 15, on his Facebook.
Kudrytskyi resigned from the national electricity transmission system operator Ukrenergo in September 2024.
In November, he co-founded Nedzhen together with Andriy Nemirovskyi, a former Ukrenergo board member.
In April 2025, Nedzhen agreed to launch the Power One energy project with Dragon Capital, which belongs to Czech entrepreneur Tomas Fiala. The investment company began looking at the energy market after Russia destroyed Ukrainian power plants in 2024, Forbes Ukraine wrote.
Dragon Capital, which owns 100% of Power One, acts as a financial partner, while Nedzhen acts as an operating partner. The ownership structure will reportedly change as new capital is raised.
Unlike traditional infrastructure projects, Power One combines smaller-scale power units into a single network managed from one dispatch center.
“It reflects our vision of a new energy system where not only consumption but also electricity generation is dynamic,” Kudrytskyi wrote in his Facebook post. “This kind of system requires greater flexibility and new business models, where the choice of technology is simply a tool to build the specific generation portfolio the energy system needs.”
According to Kudrytskyi, the first phase focuses on balancing capacity. The company plans to deploy gas piston power plants and energy storage systems, each with a capacity of 10-15 megawatts (MW).
Dragon Capital is investing $30 million of its own capital in the first phase of the project. The company has already spent more than half of this amount on equipment and land plots. Loan funds will account for 60-70% of the investment, Fiala told Forbes.
Later on, the portfolio will reportedly include renewable energy sources. Wind farms are expected to follow in other stages due to their longer development timelines and higher capital intensity.
According to Fiala, Dragon Capital expects a return of about 30% and a payback of three to three and a half years. “The payback depends on how quickly we can launch the stations,” the businessman told Forbes.
“We plan to use our opportunities to attract foreign capital to build a portfolio of several hundred MW over the next 1.5 years and be one of the leaders in the transformation of the Ukrainian energy system, help it survive the war, and become the foundation for the country’s recovery,” Kudrytskyi wrote on Facebook.