Cuba seems to solar to unravel its vitality disaster
By Leticia PINEDA
Cienfuegos, Cuba (AFP) April 4, 2025
Not removed from the ruins of an unfinished nuclear energy plant within the Cuban province of Cienfuegos, tons of of staff are unexpectedly putting in 44,000 photo voltaic panels because the island seeks as soon as once more to cut back its reliance on oil to flee an vitality disaster.
Forty years in the past, the answer was considered Russian nuclear vitality. This time, it’s the solar. With assist from China.
Dozens of containers with Chinese language inscriptions are lined up on the “La Yuca” photovoltaic park, the place forklifts loaded with photo voltaic panels weave between the concrete frames that can maintain them.
“We’re laying wires, digging trenches and putting in panels,” a employee on the mission, to be accomplished in Might, defined of the frenetic exercise.
Cuba, an island of some 10 million inhabitants, stays extremely depending on fossil fuels to function its eight outdated thermoelectric energy vegetation, most of them on-line because the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s and vulnerable to frequent breakdowns.
The communist authorities has authorized the development of 55 photo voltaic parks by 2025.
5 of them can be within the central province of Cienfuegos, that additionally hosts an industrial port and a refinery, and was chosen within the Nineteen Eighties to host a Soviet-funded nuclear energy plant that was aborted half-built when the USSR collapsed.
Cuba’s fragile electrical grid has gone offline 4 instances prior to now six months, plunging the vast majority of the nation into darkness, generally for days on finish.
Many of the nation faces near-daily outages blamed primarily on gasoline shortages.
“Greater than half of all of the gasoline consumed by the nation goes in direction of electrical energy manufacturing,” Power and Mines Minister Vicente de la O Levy not too long ago informed state-run newspaper Granma.
– Hundreds of thousands of {dollars} –
Many of the oil has come from Venezuela which, like Cuba, is beneath US sanctions and has seen the administration of President Donald Trump not too long ago revoke licenses that allowed transnational firms to extract crude there.
The nation additionally makes use of floating electrical vegetation rented from a Turkish firm, and mills fueled by crude oil at the same time as there may be not sufficient petrol for the island’s automobiles, tractors and ambulances.
The nation produces a couple of third of the gasoline it consumes from home oil fields, and imports the remaining.
De la O Levy has stated photo voltaic parks are on the coronary heart of Cuba’s renewable vitality objectives as a result of the “investments are cheaper, they’re constructed extra rapidly, and may be unfold all through the nation.”
The communist island, grappling with its worst financial disaster in a long time, goals to generate 12 p.c of its vitality from renewable sources by the top of 2025 and 37 p.c by 2030.
By the top of this 12 months, it hopes to provide 1,200 MW per day from photo voltaic vitality — nearly equal to its every day electrical energy deficit of 1,500 MW.
The bold mission requires funding of a number of million {dollars}, and with few Western buddies, Cuba has gladly accepted help from what the presidency described in February as “the sister nation of #China.”
A complete value estimate has not been made public.
– ‘The quickest approach’ –
Simply 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) from “La Yuca” stands an imposing metal dome designed to guard what was going to be a nuclear reactor — the final large-scale try to alter Cuba’s vitality combine.
Russian inscriptions are nonetheless seen on its thick concrete partitions.
The mission was canceled in 1992 by then-president Fidel Castro after the autumn of the USSR, a Cuban ally, which had largely financed the mission and supplied physicists and engineers.
Eliecer Machin, a thermophysicist educated within the USSR who nonetheless lives within the “nuclear metropolis” constructed to accommodate the would-be energy plant’s personnel, recollects the “arduous blow” when it was shuttered.
The 60-year-old now makes a residing as a pig farmer.
Right now, because of errors made prior to now, he stated, photo voltaic is “the quickest option to acquire vitality.”
College of Texas researcher Jorge Pinon stated the photo voltaic vitality would imply little if Cuba would not have batteries to retailer it to be used in intervals of darkness.
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