By Eurasia Network – October 31, 2020
Estimated investment is worth $ 1 billion – the largest wind power project in Ukraine
On October 30 the Ukrainian company WindFarm LLC signed a contract with the Chinese corporation PowerChina on the joint implementation of a giant project for the construction of an 800 MW wind farm in the Donetsk region in Eastern Ukraine.
The future wind power station will be located in Nikolsky and Mangushsky districts of the Donetsk region. These areas are located near the city Mariupol.
In August 2019 the company Wind farm LLC started the construction of the network infrastructure, installing a power distribution line of 330 kV with a length of 32 km.
The project will not benefit from the “green tariff”, which has been reduced by a new legislation adopted last July. WindFarm LLC and PowerChina will therefore carry out this project under market competitive conditions.
The estimated cost of this onshore wind farm project is USD 1 billion (845 million euros), which makes it the largest and most expensive wind power plant in Ukraine.
So far it remains unclear how many wind turbines will be used, which company will supply the turbines and related equipment and when construction will start and will be completed.
The press release of the Ukrainian company WindFarm LLC stressed that :
“The implementation of the project demonstrates a completely new and beneficial approach for Ukraine in the development of the wind energy sector – the sale of generated electricity on the electricity market without a green tariff”.
The Chinese company PowerChina is engaged in the design and construction of energy and transport facilities and is included in the TOP-100 largest companies in China and in the TOP-500 largest companies in the world. PowerChina owns the world’s largest hydroelectric power station “Three Gorges Dam” with a capacity of 22.5 GW and based on the China’s longest river Yangtze.
The Ukrainian company WindFarm LLC is developing a portfolio of wind power plants with a total capacity of 1.3 GW, of which more than 400 MW have already been commissioned.
Registered in Kyiv in July 2019, Wind Farm LLC is mainly engaged in the construction of wind farms, generation, distribution and trade of electricity. Legal documentation revealed that shareholders are Zhanna Nuzhnenko and Director is Yury Zhabsky, a former Director at DTEK Renewables and current member of the Board of the Ukrainian Wind Energy Association.
This giant wind farm project is the second in Ukraine where is involved PowerChina. The Chinese company took part as EPC contractor in the Syvash wind power project launched in 2019 by the Norwegian NBT and the French Total Eren. The wind farm has a total capacity of 245.7 MW. Investment in this onshore project located in the Kherson region in Southern Ukraine reached 376 million euros.
Read also : Why investors choose Ukraine for renewable energy ?
Last July the Ukrainian Parliament adopted the bill on green tariff in second reading. The new legislation reduces the amount of compensation under green tariff for solar power plants by 15% and for wind farms – by 7.5%. According to the Acting Minister of Energy Olha Buslavets, the current “green” tariffs cost Ukrainian consumers about UAH 1 billion per month (around 29.8 million euros).
The Ukraine’s State budget for 2021 has allocated UAH 20 billion (around 597 million euros) to pay the “green” tariff debt to electricity producers. The Ukrainian Prime minister said last August that the government plans to pay 40% of accumulated debt in Q4 2020.
Ukraine has been reforming its energy sector since 2009 by adopting legislation on renewable energy. The country joined the European Energy Community in February 2011 and set in October 2014 the goal to increase renewable energy share in the national power mix to 11% by 2020 while the Energy Strategy of Ukraine until 2035, adopted in 2017, set the target of 25% of renewable energy share by 2035.
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