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The Unit 1 of the Ernesto Guevara de la Serna Thermal Power Plant, located in Santa Cruz del Norte, Mayabeque province, went offline this Tuesday due to a failure in the turbine regulation system.
According to the official portal , the outage occurred at 8:12 PM, which coincides with a protest in the Playa municipality of Havana, where reports indicate more than 10 hours of blackouts throughout the day.
The breakdown occurs at one of the most critical moments for the National Electric System (SEN), which was already facing a projected shortfall of 1,643 MW for the peak nighttime hours this Tuesday, with a availability of only 1,927 MW compared to a maximum demand of 3,500 MW.
The affected unit has a capacity of 55 MW, the smallest of the three operational units at that plant, but its outage exacerbates a situation that was already alarming before the failure occurred.
Before this new breakdown, the Unit 2 of the CTE Felton was already out of service due to a fault, and the units from the CTE Mariel, Renté, and Nuevitas were offline for maintenance, in addition to thermal limitations affecting an additional 526 MW and the lack of fuel impacting another 931 MW of the system.
The trigger for the current crisis was the outage of the CTE Antonio Guiteras, the largest power generation plant in the country with a nominal capacity of 250 MW, which went offline last Monday at 3:00 AM due to a puncture in the boiler.
That malfunction triggered blackouts that reached a maximum impact of 1,871 MW on Tuesday at 8:50 PM, one of the worst recent records in the SEN.
The CTE Ernesto Guevara de la Serna belongs to the Santa Cruz del Norte Company, regarded as the largest producer of electricity in the country with a total capacity of 480 MW, contributing approximately 12% of the national generation.
The plant operates with domestic crude, which allows it to avoid imports valued at around 400,000 dollars daily, but its units have experienced recurring breakdowns throughout 2025 and 2026.
Unit 1 itself had already gone offline on February 15, 2026, while the Unit 3 did so due to an emergency in October 2025 and again in December of that year, worsening a deficit that exceeded 1,900 MW.
The Cuban electrical crisis has reached dramatic milestones in recent weeks: a total collapse of the national electric system on March 16, 2026, lasting 29 hours and 29 minutes, another collapse on March 22, and a maximum loss of 1,945 MW recorded on April 1, while the Cuban population endures blackouts of up to 24 hours daily across the country.
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