The EU Dispatchable Power Deficit and Its Infrastructural Solution: Asynchronous HVDC Back-to-Back Interconnection in Poland Using Ukrainian Nuclear Generation

The electricity sector of the European Union has entered a phase of persistent dispatchable power deficit. The accelerated decommissioning of coal-fired power plants and some gas units, the slow pace of constructing new nuclear units, and the increasing share of variable generation have led to a growing gap between formally installed capacity and capacity actually available during peak demand hours. Internal solutions—new nuclear power plants, hydropower, gas turbines, energy storage, and further expansion of renewable energy sources—are unable to eliminate this deficit within the next 10 years due to long implementation cycles, regulatory constraints, and high capital intensity. Under these conditions, the article argues that the only realistic external source of cheap, dispatchable baseload power for the EU remains Ukraine. Unlike Russia and Belarus, which are excluded for institutional and systemic reasons, Ukraine combines a physical surplus of nuclear generation with technical and regulatory compatibility with ENTSO-E. The structural decline in industrial demand, combined with the preservation of the post-Soviet nuclear power plant fleet, creates a persistent export resource that cannot be realized through existing alternating current interconnections due to network constraints and risks of synchronous operation. The article proposes a solution in the form of an asynchronous HVDC back-to-back interconnection with a capacity of 2 GW, expandable in stages to 4 GW, located on Polish territory. It is demonstrated that this technology is industrially mature, widely used worldwide, and feasible within 2–3 years. Total investment costs are estimated at 1–1.2 billion EUR, which is an order of magnitude lower than alternative methods of creating a comparable volume of dispatchable power. Based on observed price differentiation between the Ukrainian market and Central European markets, the project's payback period is estimated to range from less than one year in favorable scenarios to 3–5 years in stress scenarios, with a baseline value of around 2–3 years. Particular attention is devoted to the institutional structure of the Ukrainian energy market. An analytically neutral concept of the "Ukrainian side" is introduced as a persistent configuration of economic interests determining the sector's behavior. It is shown that nuclear energy exports are not a temporary political choice but a structurally conditioned mechanism for rent extraction and an internal actor selection factor, making export flows predictable even under high political and military uncertainty. A scenario analysis was conducted, covering Ukraine's economic stagnation, transfer of nuclear power plants to Western companies, formal or de facto abandonment of the EU's green agenda, deterioration of the military-political situation, and even partial or complete change in territorial control. In all realistic scenarios, available export capacity is preserved or increased; the only formally unfavorable scenario—rapid economic reconstruction of Ukraine—has a probability below 1% and does not affect the project's investment assessment. Separately, it is justified that locating the HVDC interconnection in Poland creates a natural infrastructure monopoly. EU regulatory practice does not permit duplication of large inter-zonal introductions after closing the power deficit, making the first implemented project dominant for decades. Thus, the HVDC back-to-back interconnection between Ukraine and Poland should be viewed not as an energy project but as an infrastructure project generating persistent export rent, comparable in significance to Europe's largest ports and transit hubs. The article concludes that constructing an HVDC back-to-back interconnection in Poland represents the dominant solution for rapidly eliminating the dispatchable power deficit in Central Europe within a 10-year horizon, while providing the European Union with access to cheap baseload generation and Poland with a long-term economic and institutional role as a key energy hub.