From emergency connection to commercial export

Three months. That is the span between a grid connected to Europe as an emergency measure and a grid selling power into the European market.

ENTSO-E and the Ukrainian transmission operator worked through the technical conditions, and at the end of June 2022 commercial capacity on the interconnection with Romania was opened for trading. Ukraine began exporting electricity westward.

Why this mattered beyond the revenue

First, it earned foreign currency at a moment when every source counted. Second, and more importantly, it proved the system worked in both directions. A grid that can export is a grid that has surplus, dispatch discipline and metering that a European counterparty will accept.

There is an engineering pleasure in this that I will admit to. A power system built in the Soviet period, designed to face east, oriented itself west and passed a European technical audit in a matter of months, while under attack. That is not a small thing.

Exports were later curtailed when generation came under sustained attack. The capability, once demonstrated, did not go away.