Ukraine’s energy system has paid an exceptionally high price for the old Soviet logic of centralization. When a few large nodes supply millions of consumers, every massive strike on infrastructure becomes an attack on the whole country. The lesson of this war is not only that Ukraine needs more generation. It is that Ukraine needs a different energy architecture.
Decentralization is no longer a distant “green” ambition. It is a matter of survival, resilience and economic common sense. Solar generation, batteries, biogas units, small flexible plants and local backup systems can make Ukraine harder to paralyze. But there is another question that receives too little attention: who will own and govern this new decentralized energy system?
Ukraine should not replace centralized generation with a new landscape of decentralized assets owned only by the state, large corporations or well-connected investors. If the country wants real resilience, it must combine decentralized generation with decentralized ownership. That means creating the conditions for energy communities and energy cooperatives.
Across the EU, citizens have already moved from being passive consumers to active participants in the energy transition. Citizens, municipalities and local businesses jointly produce, consume, store and share electricity. This is not a marginal experiment. After the EU’s Clean Energy for All Europeans package, energy communities became part of the new European energy architecture. The European Commission has reported that there are already more than 8,000 energy communities across the EU.
For Ukraine, this experience is more relevant than it may first appear. The word “cooperative” still carries negative associations because Soviet and post-Soviet practices often distorted the concept. But genuine cooperatives are not bureaucratic relics. They are democratic, member-owned organizations created so people can meet common needs under fairer conditions than the market often provides.
In energy, this means that a community can jointly invest in a solar plant, a biogas facility, a battery system, a local heating solution or backup power for critical infrastructure. The benefits do not disappear upward. They remain in the community: more reliable energy, local income, jobs, taxes, lower costs and a stronger sense of control over essential infrastructure.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has stressed that distributed energy resources are essential for Ukraine’s energy security under repeated Russian attacks. But resilience is not only technical. It is also institutional and social. A local solar-and-battery system for a hospital, water utility or school is more durable when local actors have a stake in it, understand it and help govern it. Thousands of local energy projects are harder to destroy, politically and physically, than a system dependent on a few major assets.
Ukraine has already taken steps in this direction.
Law No. 3220-IX on the restoration and green transformation of the energy system introduced important elements related to renewable energy, self-consumption and guarantees of origin. But the framework remains incomplete. The Energy Community Secretariat has noted that further alignment with European rules is still needed, including with the Renewable Energy Directive and the Electricity Directive. In practice, Ukraine still lacks a clear and simple system for launching energy communities at scale.
This is the decisive gap. Energy cooperatives will not appear merely because citizens are enthusiastic. They require rules that make participation possible and worthwhile. European experience shows that community energy grows when legislation, grid access, financing and local government support work together.
Germany offers an important example. According to the German Cooperative and Raiffeisen Confederation (DGRV), in 2025 Germany had 998 energy cooperatives with around 220,000 members. They had invested €3.6 billion in renewable energy and produced around 8 TWh of clean electricity. Community ownership is not symbolic. It can mobilize real capital and produce real energy. The lesson is clear: motivation matters, but market design matters more.
Five priorities for Ukraine
First, Ukraine needs a clear legal framework for energy communities and cooperatives. The law should answer practical questions: who can create such organizations, how they are governed, how they produce and share electricity, how they connect to the grid, how they sell surplus power and what incentives they receive. These rules should be compatible with EU law and protect the cooperative principles of voluntary participation, democratic control and local benefit.
Second, communities need accessible finance. It is unrealistic to call for local energy independence while leaving municipalities and citizens alone with high start-up costs, expensive loans and uncertain payback periods. Grants for project preparation, concessional lending, municipal co-financing, donor guarantees and start-up programs are not luxuries. They are preconditions for participation.
Third, Ukraine must simplify grid connection and energy sharing procedures. Distribution system operators should treat cooperative and community projects not as administrative complications, but as assets for national resilience. Standardized contracts, transparent deadlines, fair metering rules and predictable procedures would do more for local energy than another strategic declaration.
Fourth, the country should launch visible pilot projects now. Agricultural regions could develop biogas cooperatives. Small towns could build solar-and-storage systems for schools, hospitals and water utilities. Urban neighborhoods could test citizen energy communities. These pilots should be practical tests of what must change for national scaling.
Fifth, Ukraine and its international partners should change the narrative of reconstruction. Energy recovery should not mean rebuilding the same centralized system that Russia has learned to attack. State companies and large investors will remain important, but they should not be the only actors. A third actor must enter the system: the community as producer, investor and co-owner of energy.
This is also a task for donors and European partners. Supporting Ukraine’s energy resilience should not be limited to providing equipment. It should also include technical assistance for community energy legislation, project development grants, municipal planning support and financial instruments that allow citizens and local governments to become genuine participants in reconstruction.
Energy cooperatives are not a romantic experiment in self-organization. They are a redistribution of capability. They give communities the right not only to wait for electricity, but to produce it. They help ensure that local initiative is not punished by complexity, but rewarded by opportunity.
Ukraine’s future energy system cannot be built only around large companies, state assets and emergency repairs. It must be more distributed, more democratic and more locally rooted than the system that existed before the war. Community power is not a substitute for national energy policy. It is one of the foundations of a stronger one.
Vladislav Valentinov is professor at the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies. Vladyslav Honcharenko is professor at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. Andrii Panteleimonenko is professor at Kremenchuk Humanitarian and Technological Academy.
This article was prepared with the support of the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Genossenschafts- und Kooperationsforschung Halle-Wittenberg e. V. as part of joint research in partnership with the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies.
The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.