When the heat is a matter of survival: lessons from Ukraine’s Municipal Climate and Energy Platform

The Covenant of Mayors – East (CoM East), in cooperation with Danish Board of District Heating (DBDH), organised the Municipal Climate and Energy Platform. bringing together mayors, deputy mayors, district heating directors and international partners for a day of working sessions. The question running through every session was the same: how do Ukrainian municipalities keep their heating systems running — this winter, next winter, and the one after that.

Energy security as a community responsibility

Oksana Kysil, a CoM East national expert in Ukraine, moderated the opening and outlined the platform’s focus: finding practical solutions to preserve and develop district heating as a core element of Ukrainian cities’ energy architecture.

Vitaliy Surai, Director of the Life Support Systems Department at Ukraine’s Ministry of Regional Development, said district heating had proved its importance during the last heating season. The current policy priority is preparing for the next winter across different scenarios and strengthening coordination with municipalities.

Oleksandr Senkevych, Mayor of Mykolaiv and CoM East representative on the Board of the Global Covenant of Mayors, described the conditions Ukrainian cities now operate under: targeted attacks on energy infrastructure require both fast and strategic decisions. He says there are three priorities: practical exchange between municipalities, adapting existing systems to elevated risk, and raising public readiness.

Lesia Lohvynenko, Projects Coordinator at the Danish Board of District Heating, placed the event in its international context. Ukraine’s heating systems are going through an unprecedented test, she said. They are showing resilience that needs reinforcement through partnership, expertise, and investment.

The lessons of winter 2025-2026

The first panel took the hardest question first: what actually happened last heating season, and what does it tell us about what comes next?

Oleksandr Senkevych shared that Mykolaiv’s experience after the 2025 attack on its thermal power plant showed how quickly local solutions run out when the damage is large enough. Installing modular boiler units, rethinking reserves, rethinking infrastructure management — all of it became urgent in real time, without the option to pause.

Vitaliy Surai described the season in three words: resilience, professionalism, and restructuring. The system was transformed while still running.

Yurii Fomichev, Mayor of Slavutych, said his municipality got through the season because every level — local, national, international — pulled together. The next winters will need the same concentration of resources.

The panel named structural problems that predate the war: insufficient infrastructure protection, limited backup capacity, and the long-standing separation of the heating sector from broader energy policy. Participants discussed the concept of ‘energy islands’ — local systems capable of supplying critical infrastructure during outages.

Thorsten Vollert, Energy Adviser at the EU Delegation to Ukraine, pointed to the need to diversify energy sources and shift toward local resources. He identified the Ukraine Facility financial mechanism as a tool that opens paths to investment in heating modernisation through international financial institutions.

Technology on the ground

The second panel moved to solutions — the technologies already available and the regulatory conditions that determine whether they get used.

Kyrylo Baranchuk, representing Danfoss Ukraine, described a network-centric approach to district heating: a system integrating multiple generation sources — cogeneration units, heat pumps, biomass, waste heat — with digitalisation as the management and monitoring tool. The municipality of Skagen in Denmark was used as an example: balancing energy sources, accumulating heat, and adapting to electricity market changes.

Ruslan Holub, Head of the Association of Critical Infrastructure Operators, listed the regulatory obstacles plainly. There are no clear mechanisms for selling electricity produced through cogeneration. Grid connection procedures are complex. Tariff restrictions apply. Decisions between government bodies are not synchronised. Excess heat cannot easily be fed into existing systems. Each factor slows the development of distributed generation.

Roman Romanenko, representing Justsen Energiteknik, described biomass as one direction for diversifying heat supply. Modern biomass boiler plants can work with different types of raw material and adapt to municipalities of different sizes. He stressed that a comprehensive approach is needed — resource analysis, environmental compliance, financial planning, and operational organisation — not just equipment procurement.

Strategy, efficiency, and the value of data

Ivan Zhuchenko, Senior Consultant at Ramboll, described district heating as integrated infrastructure rather than a collection of isolated systems. The model he outlined relies on biomass boilers for base load, gas for peak demand, and heat storage for stabilisation.

Andrii Minailov, Senior Key Account Manager at Grundfos Ukraine, described the operational tools already in use: low-temperature operation to enable integration of renewable sources, temperature zoning by consumer type, distributed pumping to reduce pressure and failure rates, and real-time digital parameter control. Danish experience shows that reducing the temperature of the heat carrier alone can cut network losses by up to 24 per cent.

Halyna Melnychenko, representing Kamstrup in Ukraine, addressed metering as a management tool. Heat metering has moved well beyond billing, she said. Modern metering systems give a precise picture of consumption and losses, enable network balancing, and support decisions at every level. Without reliable data, a system cannot plan, cannot optimise, cannot develop. Danish case studies showed reductions in supply temperature of up to 10 per cent, network heat losses of up to 8 per cent, and consumer bills of up to 10 per cent — producing savings of hundreds of thousands of euros annually.

Who pays and how

The third panel put the question that no strategy can avoid: where does the money come from, and are municipalities actually ready to use it? Most, Maksym Vereshchak, Deputy Head of the CoM East initiative, noted, still rely on local budgets as their primary source. The discussion shifted from finding opportunities to building the capacity to act on them.

Søren Møller, Head of the Kyiv office of Impact Fund Denmark, described the fund’s focus: investing where the market does not work, in complex and high-risk environments. For Ukrainian municipalities this means concessional loans of up to 15–20 years, flexible repayment schedules, a high grant component, and support at the project preparation stage — where most opportunities are lost. No feasibility study, a weak financial model, no understanding of deal structure: these are the reasons municipalities fail to access financing they could have. Impact Fund Denmark works to close that gap, combining grants, loans, and guarantees into blended finance.

Kåre Stamer Andreasen, Finance Director of Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO), described a different instrument: faster, larger, and openly willing to take on risk. EIFO currently holds close to €1 billion for financing projects in Ukraine, with a significant portion still undeployed. The two institutions complement rather than compete: Impact Fund Denmark helps structure a project; EIFO moves quickly to finance it.

Svitlana Pysmak, Head of Investment and Partnership at the Decarbonisation Fund of Ukraine, presented the national instruments available now: loans, leasing, and factoring at 5–9 per cent, with terms of up to 10 years and deferred payments, covering a project from design to commissioning across energy efficiency, cogeneration, renewable energy, and energy storage.

The Mykolaiv case illustrated a constraint that applies to more than one city: even with significant grant support available, the municipality cannot take on the lending portion because of its existing debt burden. A proposal raised in the room — using frozen Russian assets as a potential source — requires decisions at the level of national policy.

The municipalities that will move fastest are not those searching for money. They are those that have prepared projects meeting investor requirements, can make decisions quickly, and know how to work in partnership. The question is no longer ‘where do we find the funding?’ It is ‘are we ready to use it?’