The third total failure of Cuba’s national electrical system (SEN) in less than 72 hours once again derailed this Sunday attempts to restore a basic service that collapsed three days ago after weeks worsening of an energy crisis that has been brewing for years.
“Steps are currently being taken to restore the connection”The director of national load distribution of the company Unión Eléctrica, Félix Estrada, declared on national television.
The director of the public company explained that a strategy is currently being followed to reorganize the country’s electricity production units by region and then start them up.
He stressed that the objective is to restore the SEN connection as quickly as possible to gradually restore service to the island’s nearly 10 million inhabitants.
He remembered it The cause of this third failure was due to a “transmission failure” while it had been possible to connect Mariel (west) and Holguín (east) in the same subsystem, separated by more than 600 kilometers.
The first total collapse of the system that left the country in “zero national energy coverage” was recorded last Friday, after an “unplanned” shutdown of the Guiteras thermoelectric plant, considered essential to the stability of the SEN.
This Saturday the actions carried out to revitalize and recover the SEN failed againwhich caused the second total disconnection, and in the last hours of the day the subsystem created in the western half of the island collapsed, so work had to be resumed.
The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, acknowledged during an appearance on Sunday that the situation in the electricity system is “very tense”.
But he said that The Government hopes that the SEN will return within two days to the state it was in before the first massive outage.He says that as a result, the majority of consumers will have electricity again “tomorrow Monday” and that “the last customer will perhaps receive (electricity) next Tuesday.”
The SEN is in a very precarious state due to the shortage of fuel – a consequence of the lack of foreign currency to import it – and the frequent breakdowns of obsolete thermoelectric plants, with four decades of operation and a chronic lack of investment.
Power outages have been common for years but the situation has gotten worse in recent weeks. In recent days, there have been days with maximum impact rates above 50%, that is, times when half of the country was simultaneously without electricity.
Frequent power outages are hurting Cuba’s economy – which contracted by 1.9% in 2023 – and fueling social discontent in a society hit by an economic crisis that has deepened in recent years.
They were also the trigger for anti-government protests.including those of July 11, 2021 – the most important in decades -, those of Nuevitas and Havana in August and September 2022, and those of March 17 in Santiago de Cuba (east) and other localities.
The last time a similar “zero production” situation occurred was in September 2022.after Category Three Hurricane Ian passed through the eastern end of the island. This caused a serious imbalance and recovery took days.
