Cuba: 50% of the Havana’s Population Already Has Electricity Service
Energy workers, 2024. X/ @dmarin324
October 21, 2024 Hour: 9:15 am
Minister Vicente de la O Levy expects the country’s electricity supply to be fully restored by Tuesday.
On Monday, the the state-owned company Union Electrica (UNE) confirmed that around 50 percent of Havana’s residents now have power, nearly 72 hours after the total blackout that affected the entire island.
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The UNE also emphasized that its “people are not resting” as they work to restore the National Electric System (SEN) following the “national zero power coverage” event that occurred on Friday, which has only been gradually addressed amid repeated setbacks in recent days.
On Sunday, authorities announced that the current strategy to address this crisis is to reorganize the SEN into three regions to facilitate the startup of different generation units. The goal is to reconnect the SEN as quickly as possible to gradually restore service to the nearly ten million inhabitants of the island.
Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy expects the country’s electricity supply to be fully restored by Tuesday. The first total blackout was recorded last Friday morning, following an unexpected shutdown of the Guiteras thermoelectric plant, one of the largest in the country and considered key to SEN’s stability.
On Saturday, efforts to re-energize and restore the SEN failed again, leading to a second total disconnection. In the final hours of that day, the subsystem created in the western half of the island collapsed, requiring restoration efforts to start over.
The SEN is in a very precarious state due to fuel shortages—stemming from a lack of foreign currency to import it—and frequent breakdowns in the outdated thermoelectric plants, which have been in operation for four decades and suffer from chronic underinvestment.
Blackouts have been common for years, but the situation has worsened in recent weeks. In recent days, maximum disruption rates have exceeded 50 percent, meaning that at times, half of the country was simultaneously without power.
The frequent blackouts are damaging Cuba’s economy, which contracted by 1.9 percent in 2023. A similar zero production situation occurred was in September 2022, after Hurricane Ian passed through the island’s western tip. This caused significant disruptions, and the recovery took several days.
teleSUR/ JF Source: EFE
