Projects & Applications
Ukraine’s largest battery storage project enters commissioning phase
Ukraine’s 400 MWh battery project dwarfs most Eastern European installations, and is expected to come online in October 2025, ahead of the winter.
By
Tristan Rayner
Jul 11, 2025
Grid-scale
Projects & Applications
Image: DTEK
DTEK and Fluence have begun commissioning Ukraine’s largest battery energy storage system, a 200 MW/400 MWh installation spread across six sites that represents one of the biggest storage deployments in Eastern Europe.
The project, valued at €140 million, consists of 698 Fluence Gridstack cubes distributed across locations with individual capacities ranging from 20 MW to 50 MW. The system is designed to provide 400 MWh of storage capacity, which the companies state is sufficient to power 600,000 Ukrainian homes for two hours. Bulgaria has an operational 124 MW / 496.2 MWh battery energy storage system, beating the coming Ukrainian installation on energy duration but falls short on power output.
Commercial operations are scheduled to begin in October 2025, coinciding with Ukraine’s winter heating season when grid stability becomes critical. The storage systems will provide frequency regulation, power reserves, and balancing services to support the national grid operated by Ukrenergo.
The project represents the first major energy infrastructure development delivered since the US-Ukraine Economic Partnership Agreement was signed in April, announced at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome.
War conditions have forced Fluence to implement remote commissioning procedures for the first time. “The remote commissioning approach we have introduced ensures continuity and operational efficiency amid travel restrictions and will also enable faster scaling of any future deployments,” said Julian Nebreda, Fluence’s CEO.
Nebreda added, “The project with DTEK to build a strong and decentralized energy system for enhanced energy security in Ukraine is perfectly aligned with our mission to transform the way we power our world. It is also one of the most impactful projects in our company’s history.”
To support local operations, 20 Ukrainian engineers and specialists completed training on Fluence installations in Germany and Finland. The training program prepared them to independently manage the storage systems and respond to operational issues.
“With our partner Fluence we are fast-tracking innovation, building homegrown technical expertise and showing that even in wartime, progress is achievable,” said Maxim Timchenko, DTEK’s CEO. “This battery storage facility is proof of our determination to build back stronger.”
The distributed nature of the six-site configuration aims to provide resilience against outages while reducing reliance on rolling blackouts that affect residential and commercial users
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