MOSCOW, September 26. /TASS/. All thermal power plants and major hydroelectric power plants (HPPs) in Ukraine have been destroyed, the country’s President Vladimir Zelensky said.
Addressing the UN General Assembly, Zelensky said his country has lost "all our thermal power plants and a large part of our hydroelectric capacity."
"Just imagine your country with 80% of its energy system gone - with such a destroyed part of the system," he added.
Ukraine lost an enormous part of its power generation capacities this spring. Ukrainian lawmaker Sergey Nagornyak, who is a member of the parliament’s committee on power generation and utilities, said in late June that the upcoming winter will be the toughest in Ukraine’s newest history. He advised citizens to look for houses, which they can heat up on their own. The country’s former minister of energy and coal industry, Ivan Plachkov, said the upcoming heating season will be a disaster and advised citizens to move in with their relatives or friends living in rural areas, where houses can be heated with wood.
Andrian Prokip, who is the director of Energy Program at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future, an independent think tank in Kiev, said that power outages lasting between eight and ten hours will begin in Ukraine as soon as temperatures drop to zero. With temperatures dropping to -10 degrees Centigrade and below, power outages may span for as long as 18 hours, in his estimates.