Not land, but megawatts: why the Burshtyn industrial park is betting on energy

Most industrial parks in Ukraine compete for investors on acreage and tax incentives. The Burshtyn project is approaching the market from a different angle – a resource that is in critically short supply and cannot be quickly reproduced anywhere else.

The Burshtyn City Council and the International Investment Office have signed a memorandum of cooperation to prepare the Burshtyn Industrial Park for incoming residents. The document divides responsibilities between the parties: the municipality handles land, permitting and administrative decisions, while the International Investment Office takes on the expert side – assessing the technical and infrastructure readiness of the site, developing the park concept, building the investment proposition and engaging with potential residents. The memorandum also provides for the future creation of a management company for the park.

The park itself covers 20.45 hectares and is listed in Ukraine's Register of Industrial (Manufacturing) Parks. According to the initiators, the territory has the potential to expand almost tenfold, which allows development to be planned in phases and does not cap the scale of future residents' projects.

The real bottleneck in Ukrainian industrial development

Ukraine's register of industrial parks is growing faster than the number of sites that actually operate. The reason for the gap is well known: registered status does not equal readiness. Between the entry in the register and the arrival of a first resident lies work that municipalities are usually unable to do on their own – technical parameters, grid connection, land management, an investment proposition, and a credible counterparty to negotiate with.

In recent years, however, a further constraint has been added – one that changes the logic of site selection itself. A significant share of manufacturers who could operate in Ukraine do not come because of a shortage of land, but because the electrical capacity they need cannot be delivered within an acceptable timeframe. The problem is not limited to generation volumes: power still has to be delivered to where it is needed, and network constraints take years and separate multi-million investments to remove.

For entire categories of manufacturing – those whose economics depend on the volume, cost and stability of electricity supply – this means that the list of suitable sites in the country can be counted on one hand.

What Burshtyn offers

Burshtyn is one of very few towns in Ukraine where an industrial site is located directly next to a major generation hub and high-voltage transmission network. Historically, the Burshtyn energy hub operated in synchronous mode with the European grid.

For a potential resident, this means a short connection distance, access to substantial capacity and greater predictability of power supply. The project's initiators stress that comparable conditions on another site would require years of infrastructure work – and in some locations are unattainable altogether.

“In industrial development you can buy land almost anywhere, but not power. There are entire categories of manufacturers that cannot enter Ukraine today – not because sites are lacking, but because capacity is. Burshtyn is one of the few points on the map where this conversation is possible at all”, says Roman Matys, President of the International Investment Office.

The territory's second advantage is its workforce. Decades of complex industrial operations have built a qualified technical and engineering workforce in the town. This is a resource that settlements of comparable size normally do not have and which, unlike roads and buildings, cannot be created quickly.

The municipality's reasoning

For Burshtyn, the project is an attempt to move beyond the single-industry model the town has lived with for decades. Notably, the municipality avoids the framing of compensating for losses – the emphasis is on making use of an asset it already has.

“For decades Burshtyn was a town of one industry. But what was built here over those decades is today our main asset: energy infrastructure of this level exists in very few towns. Our task is to use that advantage for the development of the community – new production facilities, new budget revenues, new opportunities for people who want to stay and work at home”, says Vasyl Andriieshyn, Mayor of Burshtyn.

The scale the site is designed for

What distinguishes the Burshtyn project from a typical local park is the scale built into it. The stated potential to expand the territory almost tenfold means the site is being prepared not for one or two small residents, but for the phased development of an industrial cluster in which the first phase is merely the entry point.

This fundamentally changes the range of potential counterparts. Manufacturers for whom energy is a decisive location factor rarely arrive with local-scale projects: they need large plots, substantial capacity and confidence that the site will not run into its own boundaries within three years. Until now, such companies have largely had nowhere to go in Ukraine. Burshtyn is positioning itself as an answer to precisely that demand.

“Our task is to turn this advantage into a clear investment proposition: with defined technical parameters, calculated economics and a responsible counterparty at the other end of the line”, says Roman Matys. The park, he notes, is being designed from the outset for an international investor accustomed to assessing sites against European criteria – rather than around the logic of “there is land, come and take it”.

The International Investment Office's bet

For the International Investment Office, Burshtyn is not a one-off advisory contract. The Office is entering the project intending to take it to the operational stage and may subsequently acquire the status of the park's management company – a decision to be taken by the city council in the manner established by law. For a potential resident, this means a permanent operator responsible for the site across the whole horizon, rather than a consultant who disappears after the presentation.

In parallel with technical preparation, the Office is building an international track: consultations with international institutions and outreach to European business associations and chambers of commerce, through which most decisions on locating production in Central and Eastern Europe pass. The logic is straightforward – a site has to be on an investor's radar before that investor starts searching.

The ambition the initiators make no secret of is to turn Burshtyn into more than another entry in the register: into a reference case, a site that can be pointed to as proof that an industrial location of European-level readiness is possible in Ukraine. If the energy advantage can be converted into an investment product, it will change not only the economy of a single community, but also the set of arguments Ukraine brings to industrial investors.