HAVANA — Cuba’s state utility warned on Friday that outages at the evening peak would swallow about three-quarters of national demand, hours after a fire took a generating unit offline at one of the island’s main power stations.
The Unión Eléctrica (UNE) said the blaze broke out at 6:55 a.m. in Unit 1 of the Ernesto Guevara de la Serna plant at Santa Cruz del Norte, in Mayabeque province. Energy and Mines Minister Vicente de la O Levy said on X that it was under control and that no one had been hurt. It came four weeks after the last nationwide Cuba blackout, on September 18.
The numbers are what make Friday stark. At 6 a.m. the system had 740 megawatts available against demand of 2,260. For the evening peak UNE projected the same 740 against 2,900, a deficit of 2,160 megawatts, and forecast outages of 2,190. That is 75.5 percent of expected demand, by TEH’s arithmetic. Both are projections. UNE had not published what the evening actually delivered when this was written.
The fire was one failure among many. UNE’s bulletin, which Cubadebate published, listed Units 1 and 2 at Santa Cruz, a unit at Guiteras, Felton 2 and Renté 3 and 6 as broken down, with three more units in maintenance and a further 394 megawatts lost to thermal limitations.
Unit 1 has failed before. TASS reported on April 8 that the first unit of the same plant had gone out of commission the previous evening because of a malfunction in its turbine control system.
Havana ties the wider decay to the US fuel blockade. Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said in September that if tankers were allowed in, “electricity generation would improve greatly,” and called the restrictions “a coldly calculated design” that punishes Cubans collectively, Xinhua reported. The report Cuba will take to the UN General Assembly on October 27 and 28 says the January 29 executive order also keeps shipping companies from carrying parts for thermoelectric plants, some more than 40 years old. That is Cuba’s own account.
Rodriguez also priced the US $100 million aid offer at roughly two weeks of the fuel Cuba needs for limited generation. No US statement on the fire had surfaced by Friday night.
UNE has not said how long Unit 1 will stay offline, what the fire destroyed, or what set it off. Until it does, nobody outside the plant can say whether Friday’s shortfall is a spike or the new floor.
