DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy holding owned by billionaire oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, has launched a giant 240-megawatt solar power station called Pokrovska in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.
The new station opens just two months before Ukraine is scheduled to phase out its feed-in tariff system, which provides government subsidies for green energy production, and introduce a system of auctions.
Pokrovska, which went operational on Oct. 31, is the second largest solar power plant in Europe after the 300-megawatt facility in the southwestern French city of Cestas.
Located on a former manganese ore mining quarry near the village of Katerynivka, the station’s installed capacity will be enough to provide 200,000 households with electricity, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 420,000 tons annually.
The station stands on 436 hectares, which is equal to 600 football fields. “The size of the station itself is even hard to imagine,” said Yuriy Podolyak, the commercial director of IK Net, an energy project management company in Ukraine.
Built in just eight months, Pokrovska is DTEK’s third solar project, according to Maksim Timchenko, CEO of DTEK.
“DTEK once again confirmed the status of the largest national investor in clean and safe renewable energy generation,” Timchenko said in a statement on the company’s website.
DTEK invested 193 million euros in the station, using 840,000 solar panels supplied by Chinese producer Risen.
However, the national government won’t receive much tax income from the import of equipment for the facility, as a law providing tax breaks for solar and wind producers went into effect on July 1, 2019 and will be in force until 2022, the Hromadske TV channel reported on Nov.1.
According to Andriy Gerus, head of the Committee on Energy, Housing and Communal Services of Ukraine, the tax break will cost the state Hr 5-10 billion ($200-400 million).
“This is how the very wealthy people of Ukraine, who import the equipment for their power plants, de facto steal money from teachers, doctors and pensioners,” Gerus wrote in December in 2018 on his Facebook page.
At the same time, the Pokrovska solar power station will pay more than Hr 20 million ($800,000) annually in taxes into the local budget, according to Oleksandr Grechko, a public relations specialist at DTEK.
