Sharing my prepared remarks from a fantastic event hosted at the SMU Cox Business School yesterday by the European American Chamber of Commerce.
As industrial nation states now once again shoot at each other, energy systems are high on the target list.
Ongoing warfare between Russian and Ukraine emphasizes this reality. Russia works to destroy Ukraine’s electricity and gas systems to ruin the country’s industrial capacity and try to break its civilian population’s will to resist. Ukraine now targets Russia’s oil and gas systems because they are the economic center of gravity that funds the Kremlin’s war machine. The Russian power grid may be next and coming months will be tumultuous.
Both sides now possess mass-production deep strike capabilities. Russia launches 600-800 drones and dozens of missiles on its biggest nights, while Ukraine can now muster perhaps half that number for mass strikes. Russia can range targets in all of Ukraine with munitions fired from within its internationally recognized territory and Ukraine can do the same for targets all the way into the Ural Mountains in Russia.
Ukraine’s dispatchable electricity generation capacity is now probably 1/3 its pre-war level.[i] To put that measuring stick of destruction in a Texan perspective, think about Winter Storm Uri in 2021. At the peak of the event, the ERCOT grid lost about half the proportion of generation capacity that Ukraine has and yet we still suffered a nearly weeklong blackout in many parts of Texas, causing many deaths and massive economic damage before power came back on.[ii]
The situation in Ukraine is far worse and the timeline of recovery much more uncertain. Texans had to cope with less than 7 days of Mother Nature, while Ukrainians confront more than 1,300 days of full-scale aggression by Mother Russia with no end in sight.
As the threat continues, frontline states increasingly focus on resilience. For instance, utilities in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland are now taking physical measures to harden power substations and other important infrastructure. Ukrainian utilities and communities are combining improved air defenses, physical hardening of infrastructure, and distributed generation to combat Russia’s destruction campaign.
It’s going to be a great discussion on how we can ensure the lights stay on in the face of challenging weather and relentless human adversaries. Thank you for being here with us today!
[i] Gabriel Collins and Kenneth B. Medlock, III, “Ukraine’s Electricity Sector: Urgency and Resilience in a Time of War” (Houston: Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, August 14, 2024), https://doi.org/10.25613/BC9H-J996.
[ii] https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/ercot-froze-february-2021-what-happened-why-did-it-happen-can-it-happen-again
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