The Ministry of Energy and Ukrenergo have been instructed to prepare a draft government resolution on fair consumer outage schedules. This was announced by Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal at a Government meeting on 21 May.

“This document should also include a list of critical facilities for the state that require priority power supply and the order of distribution of maximum power to other consumers not included in the list of critical facilities,” the Prime Minister said.

At the same time, the state will continue to provide alternative power generation to critical infrastructure. Special attention is being paid to providing autonomous power supply to educational institutions.

“This is especially true for vocational education, where it is important to continue offline training. We currently have 1,417 generators serving 606 vocational schools. The task of the Ministry of Education and Science and local authorities is to provide the necessary resources to operate these generators,” said Denys Shmyhal.

The Prime Minister stressed that the situation in the energy sector was difficult. As a result of russian shelling, 8 GW of power has been lost. Due to a significant deficit, Ukraine continues to import record volumes of electricity from Europe. However, the maximum technical capacity of imports is 1.7 GW.

“This means that imports do not allow us to cover the losses caused by russian terror. That is why Ukrenergo is forced to resort to hourly power cuts for businesses and citizens,” the Prime Minister said.

According to him, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has set clear tasks for the Government, local authorities and energy companies: to continue intensive restoration of power generation and distribution networks; to save energy consumption as much as possible; to establish communication with the public.

Denys Shmyhal thanked everyone who saved electricity to keep the lights on.