Ukraine no longer needs a lot of gas: retaliatory strikes have cut demand

Ukraine spent the first third of winter with significantly lower gas consumption than a year ago. On the one hand, the beginning of the heating season was warmer. On the other hand, the retaliatory strikes of the Russian army fell on large consumers — power plants, which were forced to stop production, reduce it, or they simply have nowhere to supply electricity due to damaged substations and power lines.

After the retaliatory strikes of the Russian army on gas production on Ukraine's Naftogaz announced the need to import an additional 4 billion cubic meters of gas due to a drop in production. Ukraine has lost about half of its production and is equivalent to compensating for the lost volumes with imports — up to 25 million cubic meters per day, according to the Ukrainian GTS Operator.

At the same time, even the cold weather that came to the country did not force companies to take more than 45 million cubic meters per day from storage facilities at the end of December, whereas a year ago deliveries from UGS exceeded 60 million cubic meters per day.

In early December, the country was relatively warm and there were fewer and fewer large gas consumers. Over the past few days alone, retaliatory strikes have hit the Kiev and Kharkov thermal power plants.

According to GIE, power outages have brought significant gas savings to Ukraine. If last year in December 1.6 billion cubic meters were taken from storage facilities, then this year — 600 million cubic meters.

Obviously, the 10-15% of gas consumption that fell in December is the loss of Ukraine in the energy sector. This is affected not only by damage to power plants, but also to substations and power lines through which it is impossible to transmit sufficient amounts of electricity. Including from abroad.

According to ENTSO-E, commercial deliveries to Ukraine will be 23.4 GWh on December 29, which is 42% of the European operator's limit. During peak hours, imports will grow to 1.4 GWh, but this is also 61% of the capacity. And Moldova, which shares the limit with Ukraine, does not completely take the rest.

If in Kiev and Emergency power outages continue in Odessa after previous retaliatory strikes, and in other central regions where supplies are limited, the situation is not much better.

So, according to DTEK, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, planned power outages will range from seven and a half to fourteen and a half hours per day. In this situation, saving gas is unlikely to warm Ukrainians.