Ukraine has received thousands of items in emergency aid to its power sector, but needs reserves and plan for future - Washington conference participants
MOSCOW. April 17 (Interfax) - The G-7 Plus facility for assistance to Ukraine's energy infrastructure has made it possible to donate thousands of items of essential equipment to the country, but efforts to enhance its resilience need to be continued as part of a longer-term plan for the future, Laura Lochman, United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Diplomacy in the Bureau of Energy Resources, said.
Since October 2022, G-7 Plus has connected to the grid more than 4,000 generators, 1,000 transformers, and more than 5,000 other pieces of equipment, such as circuit breakers and other devices, Ukrainian media quoted Lochman as saying at the U.S.-Ukraine Partnership Forum in Washington last week.
U.S.-EU energy Council met in Brussels last week, and assistance to Ukraine was its key subject, she said.
Among the objectives and options for attaining them, Lochman mentioned the importance of public-private partnerships in achieving that significant a result and the ability to quickly set up and efficiently run the G-7 Plus assistance mechanism, which includes multiple allies and partners, as well as international financial institutions.
In many aspects, the partners expect their Ukrainian counterparts to decide what they wish to see, based on which a single strategic plan and specific steps for its implementation should be developed. The results of this work could be reviewed at a Ukraine Recovery Conference in London at the end of June, Lochman added.
In particular, she mentioned Ukraine's capability of not only satisfying its own needs for electricity, but also being a robust source of energy for the European region, for which it has the necessary elements in the fields of nuclear power, natural gas, biomass, and renewable energy.
Roger Martella, chief sustainability officer at GE, agreed that the success of rapid assistance to Ukraine in such an uncertain environment was largely due to public-private partnerships on the part of donors. The U.S. government, including the State Department, put many things at risk to make it easier for them to focus on manufacturing, supplying, and operating the equipment, he said.
Mark Loughran, Honeywell's president for Central and Eastern Europe, said it is important to start a discussion on the essential technical specifications of future procurements with a limited number of highly experienced companies as soon as possible, so as to reach out to a broader audience afterwards. He reasoned that, to do this work, people will have to make a huge amount of efforts, and this work itself might take from 12 to 18 months.
He said he was talking not only about hardware, but also about software and digital capabilities.
GE's Martella shared Loughran's opinion on the need to have plans for two, three, or four years ahead, as the need to provide urgent assistance to Ukraine was awake-up call for the entire world, becasue power equipment reserves proved not that big, and their production takes quite a substantial time.
