Ukrainian energy companies have set up battery parks across the country to help maintain electricity during Russian attacks. The locations are kept hidden to prevent them from being targeted.
Russia’s recent strikes on Ukraine’s energy facilities – from gas pipelines to power grids – have raised concerns about Kyiv’s ability to keep power stable this winter as demand spikes.
The batteries serve as backup power, automatically kicking in if a power plant goes offline, helping prevent blackouts and giving engineers time to restore the main grid.
According to The Wall Street Journal report, their modular design also allows damaged units to be replaced without disrupting the others.
Kyiv Post reported earlier that Ukraine’s energy giant DTEK has launched the country’s largest battery storage project – a 200-megawatt system designed to stabilize the grid.
Built in partnership with US firm Fluence Energy, the project consists of six battery storage systems ranging from 20 to 50 MW each, connected to the power grid in the Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
The battery parks consist of rows of white units about 2.5 meters tall. The combined systems can store 400 megawatt-hours of electricity, enough to power roughly 600,000 homes for two hours.
“The new systems will increase the security of the electricity supply and reduce the risk of outages and accidents, especially in the event of a breakdown in maneuverable generation,” DTEK wrote in its press release.
Energy Minister Svitlana Grinchuk emphasized the importance of storage systems: “In the context of large-scale attacks on Ukraine’s energy system, the role of energy storage systems has become just as fundamental as energy generation itself.”
The project, completed in six months from March to August 2025 at a cost of €125 million ($146.5 million), was built faster than similar projects.
Fluence Energy said it trained 20 Ukrainian power engineers remotely, marking the first time the company fully commissioned a project without being on site.
This is not Ukraine’s first battery project. In 2021, a similar park was built in Enerhodar, Zaporizhzhia region. Russia captured the city, and just hours before the takeover, the software needed to operate the batteries was erased, rendering them useless, WSJ reports.
Russia has targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure since the war began. Former Energy Minister Olga Buslavets said the attacks have destroyed more than half of Ukraine’s generating capacity.