Norwegian renewable company Scatec launched its largest solar plant in Ukraine, with a capacity of 148 megawatts, in Ukraine’s southern region of Mykolaiv, the company announced on July 1.
The Progressovka plant, the company’s fourth project in the country, is designed to produce 184 gigawatts of electricity per year, enough to power 76,000 Ukrainian households, according to the press release.
Including the new plant, the company currently operates four solar plants with a total capacity of 281 megawatts. The company is building additional plants near the city of Chyhyryn in Cherkasy Oblast, which will bring its total capacity to 336 megawatts.
It’s a positive development for both the company and the troubled renewables sector in Ukraine, Raymond Carlsen, the CEO of Scatec, wrote in the company’s statement.
“We are pleased to complete our fourth project in Ukraine, supporting the country’s transition towards green energy,” Carlsen wrote.
Progress in this sector has slowed in the last two years as the Ukrainian government’s decisions have become a barrier to creating more renewable energy sources.
Billions of dollars of investment in 2018 and 2019 raised renewables’ share of Ukraine’s energy mix from almost nothing to more than 10% in a very short time. Investors were attracted to Ukraine’s relatively high guaranteed feed-in tariff for the electricity their plants would produce.
But the government soon realized it couldn’t afford the tariff. The state-owned purchaser of renewable electricity, the Guaranteed Buyer, couldn’t cope with the sharp increase in payments it had to make and soon racked up debts of almost $1 billion.
Last summer, investors agreed to a tariff cut if the government agreed to pay back all its outstanding debts.
The state still owes the private investors $600 million, a sum that it is paying off gradually.
