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Thursday has been a "blessed" day in terms of failures for the Cuban electrical system: the Electric Union (UNE) reported the outage of the unit 3 of the Antonio Maceo Thermoelectric Power Plant, known as Renté, in Santiago de Cuba, due to a technical malfunction.
According to the state-owned company published on its official account on X, “at 3:09 PM, Unit 3 of the Antonio Maceo 'Renté' CTE went offline due to an instrumentation failure in the emergency free path.”
Hours earlier, the UNE reported a new partial collapse of the National Electric System (SEN), leaving much of Cuba without electricity, amidst the uncertainty caused by the upcoming trajectory of Tropical Storm Melissa.
Mientras el país se prepara para posibles lluvias y vientos fuertes, millones de cubanos se enfrentan a la oscuridad y al silencio informativo de las autoridades, que una vez más reconocen un “fallo parcial” en el sistema sin ofrecer explicaciones claras.
The UNE informed on that there had been "a partial disconnection of the SEN" and that the causes were under investigation, but the statement, brief and ambiguous, only fueled more outrage among users.
However, the bad news continued: following the partial collapse of the SEN, a large part of Havana was left without electricity this Thursday, leaving extensive areas of the capital and other provinces of the country in the dark.
The Electric Company of Havana reported on Facebook that a “load fluctuation in the National Electric System” triggered a DAF trip that affected the substations of Plaza, Tropical, Príncipe, and Naranjito, interrupting a “significant number of circuits.”
The brief and detail-free statement only indicated that efforts are being made to restore the service "once the causes of the unforeseen issue are known."
According to industry experts, a load fluctuation occurs when energy generation and demand become unsynchronized, resulting in sharp fluctuations in the electrical frequency of the system.
This type of imbalance can result from failures in generating plants, overloads, or fluctuations in the transmission network, and it can trigger automatic disconnections to prevent further damage.
All these "unexpected events" occur on a day when a generation capacity deficit of 1,725 MW was announced. However, the newspaper headlines this Friday will surely speak of "an impact greater than planned."
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