Ukraine's Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko has said that his country's energy situation "is improving every day."
Halushchenko added that without any more waves of air strikes, "in the short term we will be able to stabilize and reduce the duration of the outage."
He said that while there would still be outages, the aim was to make them as planned as possible.
Speaking on Ukrainian television, Halushchenko outlined his vision for the future of the Ukrainian grid. “We do not want to restore the system as it was before. We will make it modern,” he said.
He spoke of two paths for Ukraine's energy infrastructure, short term and long term. The short-term aim was to restore as much as possible quickly, while in the long term, the entire grid would have a “completely different look."
Ukrenergo, Ukraine’s state-run energy operator, said Wednesday that the country's energy deficit stood at 27% as of 11 a.m. local time.
The update, posted on Facebook, said “capacity is gradually increasing, which will slightly reduce the deficit in the power system.”
It added that there are now consumptions limits for each region and that exceeding the consumption “limits leads to the need for emergency outages to avoid grid overload and ensure balance in the power system.”
Ukrenergo urged Ukrainians to continue limiting their electricity consumption so that engineers can focus on repairs.