Installed Renewable Capacity and Renewable Electricity Outcomes in Ukraine During War and Reconstruction: A Descriptive Analysis of Governance, Market, and Security Constraints

Ukraine’s renewable electricity transition combines decarbonisation with wartime resilience and post-war reconstruction. This study examines the relationship between installed renewable capacity and realised electricity generation using a structured institutional diagnostic; a same-year 2023 benchmark with Poland, Romania, and Slovakia; the capacity-realisation index (CRI); the capacity-deficit ratio (CDR); and the exploratory k-means clustering of 42 European electricity systems. The clustering model uses four non-overlapping 2023 capacity variables—renewable hydropower, onshore wind, solar PV, and bioenergy—while treating pure pumped storage separately as a flexibility characteristic. Renewables accounted for 24.8% of Ukraine’s installed electricity capacity and 18% of generation in 2023, yielding a CRI of 0.73, compared with 0.59 in Poland, 0.76 in Romania, and 0.68 in Slovakia. Ukraine therefore does not exhibit uniquely weak capacity–generation alignment within the selected benchmark. Nevertheless, the summer 2024 CDR of 19.2% and Energy Community scores of 72% for decarbonisation, 56% for markets, and 26% for energy security document substantial system stress. In the exploratory k = 3 solution (silhouette = 0.645), Ukraine belongs to a 33-case cluster and lies 0.563 standardised units from its centroid. The combined evidence is consistent with, but does not prove, constraints related to settlement discipline, grid evacuation, balancing, project bankability, and wartime security. Policy priorities include audited arrears resolution, financeable auctions and PPAs, curtailment and war-risk provisions, targeted grid reinforcement, competitive flexibility procurement, and solar-plus-storage systems for critical facilities.