Check Out This Ukraine Electric Vehicle Webinar
Before getting into the EV news, if you’d like to help out in Ukraine, I have a good option to share. My best friend in Poland and an occasional writer here on CleanTechnica, Jacek Fior, has been helping out extensively, including driving supplies to the border. He shared this charity option with me. “This a local fundraiser I support too. Small NGO but helping many Ukrainians and we’re now arranging a truck full of goods to be sent to Kiev. Every cent matters. No cent is wasted,” he wrote. Aside from donating (which my wife and I did), I hope sharing this with all of you will help many more Ukrainians get supplies and basic resources they need through some kind donations.
On to the electric vehicles. If you’ve been following the global electric vehicle market for several years, you probably learned about Ukraine’s early leadership in the sector. Naturally, like all Eastern European countries, salaries have been much lower than in places like the Netherlands and Germany. As such, sales of new electric cars (which tend to cost a fair chunk of cash and coins) have never had great potential there. However, it was still a hot early Tesla market and innovative cleantech enthusiasts in Ukraine also found efficient ways to buy and import thousands of used electric cars. For a while several years ago, Ukraine was near the top of the world for EV adoption. (And there’s no wonder why — Ukrainians have long been vividly aware of the risks that come with reliance on Russian oil and gas.) In fact, sadly, in various pictures of bombed Ukrainian cities, I’ve seen electric cars like the Nissan LEAF. But what is happening now? What is the state of the Ukrainian EV fleet and even EV market?
Jacek informed me that AVERE Ukraine, the Ukrainian arm of Europe’s largest EV association, is hosting a webinar to talk about these things. It is being organized by Denis Radiuk, who CleanTechnica has previously collaborated with and I’ve gotten to know at conferences and dinners in Europe. Denis is the president of AVERE’s Ukraine arm.
But, a webinar on EVs during a war? Actually, it’s the perfect time for it. I think I couldn’t put it better than the organizers do: “Ukraine is a regional leader by the size of the EV fleet in the region of Central and Eastern Europe. The war has shown the real importance of electric vehicles.
“The UA government has already announced the programs of rebuilding Ukraine. Due to the plans to refuse any oil and gas from Russia, the issue of development of the UA EV market is one of the most urgent and important in the agenda. It becomes even more visible on the background of increased pace of Ukraine’s integration to the EU.
“Despite the EV fleet leadership the country was late with large deployment of the electric public and freight transport. It remained a big market opportunity. Now Ukraine, experiencing aggression from one of the world’s main oil and gas suppliers, has a motivation higher than ever before to have the economy never more dependent on fossil fuel terror. It is also increased by the problems with war impacted functioning of oil products storages and supply chain. When the conventional cars stopped the EVs continued to move and it said more about the future than something else. That shows to the world a way that energy for moving produced locally saves lives.”
They also explain what the webinar will cover:
- How is Ukraine’s mobility working in the current conditions?
- How and when electric became more reliable than combustion in the times of war and why? What is the new demand being created right now?
- How has Ukraine’s motivation to opt out of fossil fuels been boosted by the war? What opportunities for the EV market operators can it create?
- How has the EV industry and the market in Ukraine been impacted? What are the market conditions of that specific situation? The demand from public (state and municipal) and non-governmental procurements, private sector.
- What are the steps to resiliency of the infrastructure ecosystem, immediate and future, can be made? Charging services, MaaS, logistics, delivery, public transport: what are their trends?
- What is necessary for the nearest updates, rehabilitation and future massive rebuild, how it can look like? How many heads, hands and how much funds will it require to reach proper results?
- Then look to the future. When this war modifies or finally is over and Ukraine has to start this massive rebuild what can it do differently and what should never do?
- What can we learn from the current market situation in building more resilient cities considering that with global warming and conflict more catastrophes will happen?
Join if you can. Click here to get tickets. Perhaps we’ll see you there.
Via that link, you can also see some more pictures of Ukrainian EVs on the front lines of the war and delivery of humanitarian aid.
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Latest CleanTechnica.TV Video
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
