On a spring day earlier this year, 10 men stood on the rooftop of a door manufacturing facility in the central Ukrainian town of Bila Tserkva, surveying the rows of solar panels that surrounded them. Since Russia invaded in 2022, the town has endured repeated attacks, triggering mass power outages. For the factory, which supplies doors to homes and businesses, keeping production going had become extremely challenging.
The outages were particularly brutal in the winter, when limited power supplies led to rolling blackouts across the country.
Some days, the employees burned discarded wood in a fireplace to keep the warehouse warm. The facility has backup generators, but they were expensive to run. Tired of relying on a grid that was being routinely bombarded by Russian missiles, Yaroslav, the facility’s owner, decided to switch to solar earlier this year. Yaroslav requested that the Kyiv Independent use only his first name and withhold details about the facility for fear of Russian retaliation.
Switching to solar energy will “further expand our capacity and be a bit more independent from the general grid,” he said. “It will be cheaper, more economical, and more ecological.”
In the spring, he contacted Yasno, a Ukrainian electricity and gas supplier owned by Ukraine’s largest private energy company DTEK, to install solar panels on his rooftop. Yasno’s clients pay for the panels to be installed, often with the help of a government program that covers
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