A new solar power system at a high school in Chernihiv Oblast will help keep heat, water, classrooms, and its shelter running through Ukraine’s hardest winters, giving students something children everywhere should be able to count on: school.
Last winter, a school in Chernihiv Oblast had more days without power than with it.
When the grid went down, the generators on site weren’t strong enough to power the building. Heating failed. The shelter went cold. Students who should have been in class were logging on remotely instead — if they could log on at all.
This winter will be different.
The lights, water, kitchen, heating, and shelter can now keep running even when the surrounding grid can’t.
For children living through more than four years of war, that means much more than keeping the lights on. It means going to school. Seeing friends. Staying warm when an air raid alert sends everyone into the shelter. And holding onto some small measure of the childhood that war has repeatedly interrupted.
Why Chernihiv Oblast? Why Does it Matter?
Chernihiv Oblast is one of the regions that has suffered the most since the war began.
In the invasion’s opening weeks, Russian forces besieged the regional capital for five weeks, destroying an estimated 70% of the city and cutting off the only road to Kyiv, trapping residents without water, electricity, or heat.¹
Because the oblast borders both Russia and Belarus, it has never stopped being a target — including a 2023 missile strike on a Chernihiv theater that killed a 6-year-old girl among its seven victims, a direct strike on a Chernihiv school in September 2025, and, this past May, guided bombs that killed a 14-year-old and partially destroyed a school in the village of Lyzunivka, elsewhere in the oblast.²
After four and a half years of war, resilient infrastructure here isn’t a luxury. It’s urgent.
What “Going to School” Means Now
An entire generation of Ukrainian school-age children has no idea what it means to go to school uninterrupted by war. Roughly 4 million children have had their education disrupted since the invasion began, and around 600,000 still cannot attend any in-person classes at all.³
For Petro Gorodylovskyi, in Lviv, an ordinary school day for his daughters, Anna, 12, and Maria, 7, can change in minutes. “A lesson can start normally, and then a few minutes later, the air raid alert goes off,” he said. “All the children have to go to the shelter, and after the all-clear, they have to return to class.” Blackouts are routine enough that homework sometimes happens by flashlight. What he wants people outside Ukraine to understand is simpler: “Ukrainian children simply want to remain children. They want to go to school, see their friends, learn, and dream about the future.” School, he said, “is a symbol that life goes on.”
That need extends beyond academics. Svitlana Hovor, near the Kharkiv Oblast border, put it plainly: “Online learning means isolation.” In-person school, she said, gives children the chance “to socialize, to learn how to communicate with other children and with teachers.” Nationally, that isolation compounds into a measurable setback — roughly two years of reading and a year of math behind pre-war levels⁴ — and it falls hardest on mothers, who absorb the added burden of security, income, and supervising remote schooling, a burden winter power outages can turn into a total loss of access for some families.⁵ ⁶
Across Ukraine, nearly a third of schools now operate hybrid or remote-only instruction, and 74 communities have built schools entirely underground just to keep children safely in class.⁷ Reliable power and a functioning shelter decide whether a child gets to be in a classroom at all.
Nova Ukraine’s Role: Building Resilience Into the Building Itself
This is the reality Nova Ukraine’s newest energy resilience project is built to answer, one school at a time.
In May 2026, Nova Ukraine and the Together with Kernel Charitable Foundation launched a partnership to strengthen the energy independence of important facilities — schools, shelters, community buildings — across Chernihiv and Poltava oblasts.
The Chernihiv high school is the partnership’s first completed project.
The work went well beyond installing panels. New cabling connects nearly all of the school’s critical infrastructure to backup power: the main building — including its kitchen, lighting, and water supply — the shelter, the boiler room, and a second school building.
The new solar system was also integrated with the school’s existing generator, allowing the two power sources to work together.
Measurable Impact
With the new system in place, the lyceum can now support heating, lighting, water supply, kitchen operations, and shelter functions across the entire facility.
The shelter matters most.
Last winter, it was cold during outages. Now, when an air raid alert sends students underground, the shelter stays warm and lit rather than becoming another place the war reaches into.
Approximately 108 students are expected to attend during the 2026/2027 academic year, with a materially better chance of staying in the classroom — and in a heated, lit shelter rather than a cold, dark one — regardless of what happens to the grid outside.
A school that reliably stays open gives a family back a measure of predictability in a life where very little can be taken for granted.
A school that reliably stays open gives a family back a measure of predictability in a life where very little can be taken for granted.
This Is Only the Beginning
This sustainable project is as much a proof of concept as it is a completed installation.
Nova Ukraine and Together with Kernel Charitable Foundation intend to expand the model to additional schools, shelters, and community facilities across Chernihiv and Poltava oblasts.
Ukraine’s domestic generation capacity has fallen sharply since 2022 — from roughly 55 GW before the invasion to around 11.5 GW by February 2026 — making distributed, local power sources like this one more valuable with each passing winter.⁸
A generator answers one winter. A solar system wired into a building’s core infrastructure — kitchen, water, heat, shelter — addresses the structural problem underneath it: Ukraine’s schools and social facilities cannot count on the grid for as long as the war continues.
Petro Gorodylovskyi put it simply: school is “a symbol that life goes on.”
Projects like this one help make that possible — not just for one winter, but for as many as the war demands.
Made Possible by You
Every child who stays in a warm classroom instead of doing homework by flashlight, every parent who calls their kids during an air raid alert just to hear they’re safe — that’s the outcome of decisions made months in advance, by people willing to fund infrastructure rather than just react to crisis.
Because of your support, one school in Chernihiv Oblast is no longer at the mercy of the grid.
The next one is already in the planning stages, and we will continue to keep you informed on the program’s growth.
Questions Readers Often Ask about this Work
What did Nova Ukraine actually build at this school?
A solar power system integrated with the school’s existing generator, plus new cabling connecting nearly all critical infrastructure — the main building (kitchen, lighting, water supply), the shelter, the boiler room, and a second school building — to backup power.
Why does reliable power matter so much for Ukrainian schools?
Beyond keeping the lights on, power failures can mean a school loses heating, water, and the ability to run its shelter — the legal requirement for any Ukrainian school to hold in-person classes at all. Nationally, more than 8,000 of Ukraine’s roughly 11,940 schools operate fully in person this year, while 1,306 remain fully remote, largely determined by local security conditions and shelter access.
How does this connect to what Ukrainian families are actually experiencing?
Air raid alerts routinely interrupt lessons and send children into shelters mid-class. Some families have gone years relying on generators or backup power stations just to keep online classes running during blackouts. Underground schools — 74 of them nationwide as of September 2026 — have become one of the few ways some frontline communities can offer in-person education at all.
Who is Together with Kernel Charitable Foundation?
Nova Ukraine’s partner on this project, a Ukrainian charitable foundation working across 16 regions and more than 225 communities to support local infrastructure and development. This solar installation is the first completed project under a partnership that began in May 2026.
How many students benefit from this project?
Approximately 108 students are expected to attend the lyceum during the 2026/2027 academic year — meaning well over 100 households where a caregiver also benefits from a school that stays reliably open.
Is this a one-time project or part of something bigger?
It’s the first completed site in a broader Nova Ukraine and Together with Kernel Charitable Foundation partnership aimed at strengthening the energy independence of schools, shelters, and other socially important facilities across Chernihiv and Poltava oblasts.
How can I support this work?
Readers can follow Nova Ukraine’s newsletter for updates as the partnership expands to additional sites, and can support the work directly through Nova Ukraine’s donation channels.
Sources
- Human Rights Watch, “Ukraine: Civilians in Besieged Chernihiv Need Access to Essentials,” Mar. 2022; AP reporting on the Siege of Chernihiv, Mar. 2022.
- Wikipedia, “August 2023 Chernihiv missile strike”; WarEcho, “Russia Attacks School in Chernihiv,” Sept. 18, 2025; Kyiv Independent/Yahoo News, “Russia hits Chernihiv Oblast with guided bombs, killing child,” May 2026.
- UNICEF, “Ukraine’s recovery is dependent on the recovery of children’s education,” 2026.
- UNICEF, “Ukraine two years: Children in frontline areas forced to spend up to 5,000 hours sheltering underground,” Feb. 2024.
- CARE, “Students in Ukraine head back to school, but not back to normal,” 2026.
- World Vision, “Ukrainian Children Face Worsening Learning Loss in Fourth Winter of War,” Feb. 18, 2026.
- Andrew E. Kramer and Evelina Riabenko, “For These Children, Getting a Safe Education Means Going Underground,” The New York Times, Sept. 1, 2026.
- The Ukrainian Review, “Power Outages as the New Reality: The State and Prospects of Ukraine’s Energy System,” May 2026. theukrainianreview.info
Personal accounts in this piece were shared by Ukrainian families in Lviv and Kharkiv Oblast, describing their own experiences of wartime schooling; they are not affiliated with the Chernihiv Oblast lyceum profiled here. Project details were sourced from Nova Ukraine internal team communications.
