Ukraine’s biggest private energy firm, DTEK, has launched a major battery storage facility that will bring power to hundreds of thousands of homes and strengthen the grid ahead of expected Russian attacks this winter, the company said.
DTEK partnered with American energy firm Fluence Energy Inc. — which provided 698 Gridstack batteries to the project — to build and connect six new battery storage systems to the grid in Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts. The facility is now the largest in Eastern Europe, ahead of a project in Bulgaria for a 124.1 megawatt battery storage system that is currently being completed.
The batteries, ranging from 20 to 50 megawatts, form a 200 megawatt system — enough to power 600,000 Ukrainian homes for two hours — reducing blackout risks and helping to stabilize the grid.
“This (battery) system is bringing more resilience to the energy system,” DTEK’s CEO Maksym Timchenko said at a press briefing on Sept. 10, later adding that he anticipates Russia will resume big attacks on Ukraine’s energy facilities.
DTEK invested 125 million euros ($146 million) in the project, completing it between March and August 2025, which the company said is a record time, as construction of this scale usually takes 12–15 months. Commercial operations will start Oct. 1, DTEK said.
The country is bracing for another wave of Russian attacks, with a recent strike on a thermal power plant in Kyiv Oblast cutting off electricity to part of the region on Sept. 8. Areas away from the front line have largely avoided blackouts this year, but that could change as Russia steps up its attacks, Serhiy Kovalenko, the CEO of energy supplier Yasno, a DTEK subsidiary, previously warned.
The batteries are spread out across six undisclosed locations in Ukraine, which helps de-risk the projects from Russian attacks compared to a centralized system, Julian Jansen, managing director covering southern and eastern Europe at Fluence, said during the briefing.
DTEK cannot completely reduce the risk of Russian attacks by 100% and the company is developing different ways to improve the protection of the battery system, said Timchenko. The company’s air defenses, which include drone interceptors and passive defenses like concrete shelters, are working well for the company, he added.
Russian strikes damaged 90% of DTEK’s thermal power plants last year and nearly 10,000 power facilities since the start of the full-scale invasion, leading to rolling blackouts across the country. Since 2022, DTEK has spent 346 million euros restoring its thermal plants and 17 million euros on power facilities like substations, transmission lines, and transformer points.
“We are fighting to restore destroyed capacity to our power generation, but at the same time, we build coal enrichment plants, we build wind plants, and we build better solutions,” said Timchenko.
The energy giant has invested 1.9 billion euros into Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion, including 200 million euros ($234 million) in a wind farm in Mykolaiv Oblast. The company is currently conducting a 450 million euro ($526 million) expansion of the farm — also the largest in Eastern Europe — along with Danish energy company Vestas.
The cooperation with Fluence is a symbol of Ukrainian-American partnership and helps DTEK become “a gate opener” for foreign companies willing to invest in Ukraine, Timchenko said.
“Despite the war, we invest in Ukraine’s recovery and growth. Our energy sector, having withstood countless Russian attacks, now gains new momentum,” owner of DTEK and Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, said in a press release.
“We are launching a cutting-edge energy storage system — unique not only for Ukraine, but for Western nations as well.”
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The financing will help Ukraine better prepare for the autumn and winter months as the country’s gas storage reserves fall to their lowest level in at least 11 years due to Russian attacks.
