Challenges and pathways for renewable energy transition amid crisis: A case study on community perspectives during the Russian war against Ukraine

Abstract

The ongoing war in Ukraine has exposed the vulnerability of centralised energy systems while increasing the importance of decentralised renewable energy for maintaining essential public services. Existing research has largely focused on infrastructure damage, national energy policy, technological potential, and post-war reconstruction, with comparatively limited attention to how local governments make and implement energy decisions under conflict conditions. This study examines the extent to which Ukrainian territorial communities, or hromadas, can lead decentralised renewable energy transitions and identifies the institutional, financial, technical, and security-related conditions that shape this capacity. The analysis combines geospatial assessment of renewable-energy development with semi-structured interviews involving 19 hromadas across 10 oblasts, six complementary case studies, and a strategic assessment of enabling and constraining factors. The findings show substantial variation across security contexts. Hromadas located farther from the frontline and possessing stronger institutional capacity and donor connections are better positioned to deploy decentralised renewable energy, whereas frontline communities remain constrained by restricted access, infrastructure damage, investment risk, and limited technical capacity. Solar photovoltaic systems emerge as the most feasible community-level option, identified by approximately 90% of respondents, particularly for maintaining water supply, healthcare, education, shelters, and municipal services during outages. The study further shows that wartime energy decisions are driven primarily by service continuity and energy security rather than climate objectives alone. Conceptually, the findings indicate that crisis-driven renewable-energy deployment should not automatically be interpreted as an energy transition. Its longer-term transformative significance depends on whether emergency interventions generate durable local capabilities, governance arrangements, financing mechanisms, and infrastructure. The study therefore advances research on decentralised energy governance and community resilience by showing how conflict conditions reconfigure the objectives, actors, time horizons, and technological criteria that shape energy-transition processes.