EIFO's staged wartime wind loans give transition finance a template

Denmark's sovereign wealth fund EIFO is underwriting Ukrainian wind power for the second time, moving from the guarantees it provided to DTEK Renewables' Tyligulska plant to a €100m direct loan for Kernel, an agro-industrial company building a wind farm in central Ukraine. Net Zero Investor reported the transaction on August 27, noting that Tyligulska — one of Ukraine's largest wind power plants and, by the publication's description, the world's first wartime wind farm — was constructed 100 kilometers from the front line.

The war's toll on Ukraine's electricity system is the context for that capital: Ukraine lost 80% of its pre-war thermal capacity in under two years after Russia's invasion, and roughly two-thirds of dispatchable power was either damaged or occupied, according to Net Zero Investor. Wind has emerged as a resilience play because wind plants are decentralized and distributed — harder to cripple with a single strike than a large thermal station, the report argues.

Kernel, whose exports account for nearly 8% of the world's sunflower oil, is not an obvious electricity producer; energy is a new business domain for the company, as EIFO chief executive Peter Lundquist noted. The 94.5MW project includes 21 turbines and battery storage, and its output will feed both Kernel's own operations and Ukraine's wider grid, a design that suggests the company is using wind to secure its own factories against grid failure while selling the surplus into a system that needs every megawatt.

EIFO's role has shifted between the two projects: for Tyligulska, the fund provided guarantees; for Kernel, it has extended a direct loan. "When half of a country's electricity production is gone, the priority is to bring new capacity online quickly. That requires someone to step forward," Lundquist said. Kernel CEO Yevgen Osypov frames the investment in national terms: "This project is much more than a new source of electricity. It is an investment in Ukraine's resilience, energy independence and long-term economic recovery."

Denmark's commitment to Ukraine's wind build-out is tied to its own industrial history: the world's first offshore wind farm, Vindeby, entered service off Denmark's coast in 1991 and was later managed by what became Ørsted, and Vestas, the Danish turbine manufacturer, traces its engineering heritage to the 1970s. Maintaining that leadership is one of EIFO's stated objectives, which means the fund's guarantees and loans are also a commercial demonstration for Danish wind technology.

A guarantee carried the early construction risk for Tyligulska, while a loan now puts Kernel's own balance sheet and power offtake into the credit equation — staged risk-taking of the kind blended finance is supposed to embody but rarely does in an active conflict zone.

Made while the war is ongoing, the loan sits far outside the usual transition-finance comfort zone — EIFO is not waiting for a ceasefire to build a track record but doing so with real turbines and real wiring. If Kernel's 21 units come online on schedule, the case for financing wartime reconstruction in stages will be proven in megawatts; if they do not, the template still exists, but it will carry a risk premium for everyone who follows.

The €100m size is modest next to Europe's broader energy transition budgets, but the project's location gives it outsized test value. Ukraine added a record 324MW of wind capacity in 2025, per Net Zero Investor, and the country's grid is being rebuilt in real time. Transition finance is outgrowing its green-bond adolescence, and here it is being stress-tested in the most difficult terrain available. The EIFO playbook, if it holds, will be the reference for the larger wave of postwar energy finance that Ukraine's recovery will require.