Russian forces carried out a targeted attack on a solar power plant in Ukraine's rear for the first time since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the head of Ukraine's state grid operator Ukrenergo, said at a press conference on April 4.
“Yesterday (on April 3), the enemy targeted a solar power plant. This is the first case, at least in my memory, of a targeted attack on a renewable energy facility,” Kudrytskyi said, without disclosing the location of the solar power plant.
I am confident that this is not the first that Russia has hit a solar farm, though I don’t know whether that earlier case was considered to be a dedicated power generation facility or not; it might have been some organization that had its own array, wasn’t aimed at providing power to others.
I distinctly remember looking at footage of some solar panels, a big crater blasted in them, and a number of damaged or destroyed panels, and commenting on the fact that Russia was using some rather-costly weapons to destroy some not-incredibly-value-dense infrastructure, though.
Two Russian missiles have hit a ground-mounted solar plant near Kharkiv, Ukraine. According to the manager of the plant, the missile attacks produced holes at the site that measured 6 meters deep and 11 meters in diameter.
Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform has reported that a Russian missile strike has hit a ground-mounted solar plant in Merefa, close to the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
The missile strike hit the solar plant on the night of May 28. Ukrinform quoted local media outlet Suspilnie Kharkiv as saying that the project had been built on a former landfill site under Ukraine’s feed-in tariff scheme. It had been operational for about a year and a half.
According to the manager of the project, Volodymyr Ronchakovsky, the missiles produced holes at the site measuring 6 meters deep and 11 meters in diameter. The missiles were reportedly launched from Belgorod, western Russia.
In mid-March, the Ukrainian Association of Renewable Energy (UARE) said that 37% of the nation’s ground-mounted solar project capacity had been built in areas where armed conflict was taking place, with another 34% in adjacent areas. The UARE reported “registered cases of destruction” of solar panels and claimed that Russian forces “steal all the equipment from the stations – everything that can be stolen and taken away.”
That being said, it’s possible that there are translation issues somewhere involved here, or a mistake made.
My guess is that this is the facility that was hit in 2022. It looks like Ukraine’s repaired it and added more solar panels since then.
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