According to Valentyn Zemlyanskyi, director of energy programs at the Center for World Economy and International Relations of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the abolition of feed-in tariffs for electricity will hit the socially disadvantaged strata of the population, especially pensioners, the most
In his article for Glavreda, Zemlyansky writes that before, at the preferential tariff they paid on average 1 kWh 1.07 UAH and now all 200 kilowatts will be charged at the same price of 1.68 UAH.
The main purpose of this rise is to kill the budgets of Ukrainian households with small incomes because the more they have to pay for utilities, the less money is left for other needs, which in turn leads to poverty”, says the expert: “Pensioners, of course, are of Stalinist hardening and will continue to get by and pay, but in this case, the rise in utility tariffs will lead at best to partial payment and result in accumulation of debts.
The current increase is not the limit and the price of electricity could soon rise by 2.5 times. The coming increase is unlikely to be abrupt, more likely to be a gradual increase as in 2015-2017, with a possible benchmark of 4 hryvnia per kWh. Therefore, it is likely that from April the price of 1 kWh could rise to at least 2 hryvnias.
“After all, with the current model of the electricity market, suppliers have nowhere to get money but by raising tariffs for the population – the state simply offers them no other option. And since Ukrainians have no other option but to pay for electricity at the market price, the increased tariff could justify itself if people’s incomes were also indexed in line with the inflation rate”, – Zemlyansky writes, – “But this is just a problem, as salaries and pensions in Ukraine have not been indexed since 2016. As a result, the entire country is paying for the experiments of the state, as the launched market model was initially unviable and now it is being resuscitated exclusively at the expense of the population.”