Cuba opens photo voltaic park hoping to stave off blackouts
by AFP Employees Writers
Havana (AFP) Feb 21, 2025
Cuba on Friday unveiled a brand new photo voltaic vitality park within the capital Havana, a part of an formidable challenge to alleviate the communist island’s more and more determined battle with energy blackouts.
The dire state of Cuba’s energy era infrastructure, largely depending on oil from Venezuela, has seen the nation of 10 million individuals battle with close to day by day outages in some areas in latest months.
In some provinces, electrical energy entry is restricted to a couple hours a day.
Cuba’s eight outdated thermoelectric crops, most of them on-line for the reason that Eighties and ’90s, undergo frequent breakdowns.
Underneath a US commerce embargo for the reason that Sixties and battling its worse financial disaster in a long time, the nation additionally makes use of floating electrical crops rented from Turkish firms, and mills fueled by crude oil Cuba is struggling to pay for.
The federal government in Havana has mentioned it needs to put in not less than 55 photo voltaic parks by 12 months’s finish to generate 1,200 megawatts of energy — elevating its renewable vitality era from about 5 to 12 p.c.
The primary such park, “the product of collaboration with the sister nation of #China,” in accordance with the presidency, went on-line Friday.
One other is because of observe subsequent week.
“It is a magnificence,” the workplace of President Miguel Diaz-Canel added in a publish on X accompanied by photos of rows upon rows of shiny photo voltaic panels.
The park has a capability of 21.8 megawatts that may “progressively scale back the annoying blackouts throughout sunlight hours” within the populous Havana municipality, state information portal Cubadebate mentioned of the challenge.
Earlier this month, the federal government was pressured to shutter faculties and shut companies for 2 days to save lots of vitality after electrical energy provide dropped to half of demand.
By 2030, the nation goals to generate greater than a 3rd of its electrical energy from photo voltaic parks and different renewable sources.
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