Total instability: The Felton is exiting the SEN again just hours after synchronizing

Unit 1 of the Lidio Ramón Pérez (Felton) thermoelectric power plant went offline again this Wednesday “in emergency bypass mode”, just a few hours after having synchronized with the National Electric System (SEN), according to reported the Electric Union (UNE) in an update released at 12:02.

Felton's new strike occurs in an environment of extreme fragility in the system, characterized by sustained generation deficits and failures that necessitate constant changes in availability.

The UNE itself had reported that Felton 1 was “online” hours earlier, but the emergency shutdown once again places the plant—one of the most important in the country—at the center of the energy instability that is hitting the population with prolonged blackouts.

This setback comes on the same day that Cuba faced a mass blackout in the west that left provinces from Pinar del Río to Cienfuegos without service.

In its latest update available in the report, the state-owned company reported the availability of the SEN at 1,389 MW against a demand of 3,329 MW, with estimated impacts of 1,972 MW due to capacity shortfall, a figure that reflects the magnitude of the imbalance between generation and consumption.

It was mentioned in that same report that unit 6 of Nuevitas (Diez de Octubre) and unit 3 of Antonio Maceo (Renté) had recently been synchronized, but the subsequent outage of Felton tightens a system that is already at its limit.

The deterioration has been ongoing for several days. On Monday, according to the UNE report, the country experienced outages throughout the 24-hour period, peaking at 2,105 MW at 7:00 PM. There were prior breakdowns reported in unit 2 of Felton and unit 3 of Renté, in addition to several units undergoing maintenance and a severe impact from the lack of fuel on distributed generation, with 102 power plants offline that accounted for 914 MW out of service.

In Havana, the Electric Company has also been warning about daily interruptions and changes in the schedule due to low availability.

With the Felton coming in and out "within a few hours" of each other, the episode again portrays the total instability of a system that, in addition to operating with a chronic deficit, faces regional failures capable of leaving several provinces in the dark all at once, with direct consequences for households, hospitals, transportation, and the Cuban economy.