Azernews.Az

By Bloomberg

Hot weather in Ukraine has limited reserves of water for power generation, possibly requiring more coal to be burnt in winter.

Temperatures were 0.9 to 2.4 degrees Celsius (1.6 to 4.3 Fahrenheit) above the long-term average in June, according to the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Center. Water reservoirs on the Dnieper River, which supplies Ukraine’s largest hydro- electric power station, will reach historical lows if the dry and hot weather prevails in July, it said.

Ukraine gets about 6 percent of its electricity from running water through turbines, which is used along with coal to back up electricity from nuclear reactors, according to the U.S. energy department. Thermal generation to offset insufficient water reservoirs would cause a “huge overuse of coal,” according to Deputy Energy Minister Oleksandr Svetelik.

“This year water reserves, inflows to the Dnieper and Dniester rivers are extremely low,” Svetelik said Wednesday in an interview in his office in Kiev. “We are preserving the water resource as much as we can for winter.”

Ukraine’s supplies of anthracite coal, used for power generation, production of hot water and heating, have been disrupted in the 16-month armed conflict with pro-Russian separatists in its eastern regions. Anthracite output fell 90 percent from a year earlier in the first quarter, to 758,000 metric tons, according to coal miner DTEK.

Ukraine has 1.6 million tons of coal at power stations, Svetelik said. Power generators need to add about 1 million tons in the next three months for winter heating, Energy Minister Volodymyr Demchyshyn said Tuesday.

Ukraine had several weeks of rolling blackouts in December because of thermal coal shortages. Companies will have to import anthracite if deliveries from the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics in the eastern coal mining areas are disrupted by fighting, Svetelik said.