Why Cities Were Left Without Heat This Winter and What Needs to Change Before the Next One

This winter, big cities again ended up in a no-heat scenario after strikes on combined heat and power plants, and what solutions can realistically reduce risks next season. The main conclusion is uncomfortable but straightforward: a centralized district-heating model in a missile war is a vulnerability that routine repairs will not cover, and without systemic change it will reproduce the same consequences after every wave of attacks.

This time several factors overlapped at once. Weather conditions were harsher, and the enemy used the cold as leverage. At the same time, the strike pattern shifted: where earlier the main priority had been electricity generation and the transmission system operator’s grid, attacks expanded to include CHP plants as the backbone of urban heat. The reason is simple: the number of strike assets increased, while Ukraine’s ability to cover the airspace is limited. When a shortage of air defense meets centralized infrastructure, the outcome becomes a matter of time, not chance.

An important detail lies in physics and geometry. A CHP plant is a facility spanning dozens of hectares, and it cannot be “wrapped” in engineering protection in a way that would actually stop a missile or a mass drone raid. In such conditions, the only effective protection is air defense, not concrete or shelters. So the question “why wasn’t it protected” is not about willingness, but about the fact that at a critical level only sufficient air defense capacity can provide protection here. However, this is exactly where what could have been done in previous years, but was not done in time, becomes visible. Even if one assumes that strikes cannot be fully prevented, consequences could have been reduced through two practical steps: prepare response scenarios and stock critical equipment for rapid recovery, and start real decentralization of heat supply and, partly, electricity. The idea is not to “beat missiles with repairs,” but to ensure a city is not dependent on a single large node whose failure paralyzes entire districts.

There is also a management inertia problem. One revealing fact is that a significant amount of equipment provided by international donors generators, cogeneration units, and boilers remained unconnected. This means the shortfall was not only in hardware, but also in the speed of decisions, approvals, grid connections, and accountability for the final result. When equipment sits “in storage,” it does not heat radiators, and its presence in reports does not translate into warmth in homes. This is where the issue of small modular boiler houses comes in. It is not a revolutionary idea it is a standard solution used in Ukraine and worldwide. Its value is not novelty, but a survival logic for cities. Where large CHP plants have been the foundation of heat supply, decentralization reduces the “radius of catastrophe”: if one point is knocked out, half the city does not go down at once. The technical argument for this approach is pragmatic. Mini boiler houses are installed near existing central heating substations and tied into the current networks. This does not require a massive rebuild of engineering infrastructure. Some Ukrainian cities already operate precisely this way. In Kyiv this is visible even in historical differences on the right bank, dozens of small boiler houses traditionally worked, while the left bank was built largely in the Soviet period with a focus on large centralized CHP plants. What once made economic sense has now become a vulnerability, because centralization creates one large target.

Alongside this, there is another layer of the problem regulation. If certain rules prevent rapid rollout of necessary solutions, they will have to be changed quickly. War leaves no space for situations where a city freezes simply because procedures failed to keep pace with reality. But regulation is not the main source of resistance. The toughest resistance is likely to be political and economic. The lobbying power of municipal heat-supply monopolies has a direct financial interest in preserving the old model: annual multi-billion spending on endless repairs of worn-out heat networks and large facilities reproduces a familiar system of cash flows. Decentralization would mean losing part of control and part of the money. In that logic, even the idea of restoring destroyed infrastructure “as it was” looks less like a safety strategy and more like an attempt to return to a model that will again become a target. Hence debates around rumors of a possible plan to bring an old CHP plant from Romania to restore a destroyed facility: the risk of being hit again by new attacks does not disappear.

A city’s energy security is also tied to gas. Strikes on production facilities led to a loss of a significant share of domestic output, but specialists restored damage quickly, so the enemy did not achieve a full destabilization. Another safety net is the ability to import, which allows the season to be completed without a critical deficit. The problem is different: imported gas is more expensive, and relying on donor funding cannot be a long-term model. This brings the discussion to a sensitive point: over time, the country will have to find domestic resources, and one difficult but necessary decision may be bringing gas prices for households and district-heating companies to an economically justified level. As for gas infrastructure, the gas transmission system is operating and remains in a satisfactory condition. Attacks focused more on the power sector, municipal heat supply, and gas production. At the same time, building a full protective structure over production facilities is technologically difficult, but partial solutions exist: anti-drone nets, gabions, electronic warfare systems, and the use of mobile fire groups. However, there is no clear public picture of funding and actual completion rates for such measures, which makes tracking progress harder.

The issue of gas reserves also comes down to planning discipline. Before the season, 12 billion cubic meters were accumulated against a target of 13.2 billion. From there, two benchmarks matter: the reserve level by the end of the season and the plan for next winter, where a desirable level is about 14 billion cubic meters, or less if sufficient import volumes are contracted in advance to ensure uninterrupted supply throughout the winter. Separately, it is noted that the country has become more active in using the option to import LNG from the global market via various European routes, which expands supply choices.

An additional detail is the export moratorium that runs until March 3 and was introduced back in 2022. In market terms, for an importing country export has no obvious commercial sense if the domestic price is higher. At the same time, even under the export ban private producers could sell gas domestically at a price close to import parity, meaning there was room for profits. The question that remains open is the scale of reinvestment into increasing production: an objective conclusion requires data on the number of new wells and capital investment in 2022-2025. Still, the main deterrent for private investment in wartime is clear: the daily risk of strikes and the absence of effective mechanisms to insure such risks. The overall picture reduces to one point: centralization remains the place where the adversary gains maximum effect from every strike, and slow integration of already available solutions multiplies that effect. If the next season is approached with the same heat-generation structure and the same management speed, the scenario will repeat, even if the details of attacks change.

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