Vodafone Ukraine plans solar arrays at 400 more base stations

Vodafone Ukraine plans to install solar arrays at 400 more base stations, taking its total to 500, after a first phase generated roughly 380MWh a year.

The first phase was completed in June 2026 and covered 100 sites across 14 regions, Data Center Dynamics reports. The arrays produced more than 110,000kWh over the summer and about 380MWh a year, equal to roughly 30% of the annual consumption of the base stations concerned. Each array has a capacity of approximately 360kW, and Vodafone says that under favorable conditions some sites ran without drawing power from the external grid.

For investors underwriting tower or edge portfolios, the model inputs are 380MWh a year and a 30% grid offset. Together they set a benchmark for how much of a distributed site's power bill on-site generation can remove, and how much battery reserve it frees for outages.

Yevhenii Frunza, Vodafone Ukraine's chief technology officer, said the first summer tested the systems under real conditions and that at peak generation some base stations ran off-grid. He put the case in resilience terms: "the key benefit for us is systemic: solar power reduces grid consumption and helps preserve battery charge, increasing the power reserve available during outages."

The buildout is part of a program to harden the network's energy supply during the war with Russia, which has brought sustained attacks on Ukraine's energy, telecom and data center infrastructure. Last week a ballistic missile attack hit a data center in Kyiv owned by the Ukrainian telecom company Datagroup and rendered the site inoperable, as Private Wealth Daily previously reported. Dispersed generation and battery reserve across 500 base stations is a different resilience profile from a single concentrated facility.

The report's two capacity figures do not reconcile: 100 arrays of 360kW would be 36MW of nameplate solar, far more than the 380MWh a year Vodafone attributes to those sites. The disclosed output works out to about 3.8MWh per site a year, and the 30% share implies annual consumption of roughly 1.3GWh across the first 100 stations. The report does not say whether 360kW is the rated capacity of each array or a measure of something else at the site. Per-site kWp, and the capacity factor that follows from it, are the figures a buyer would diligence first.