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The thermal power plant Antonio Guiteras, located in Matanzas, recorded its thirteenth outage from the National Electric System this Friday in 2026, caused by a new leak in the boiler, and its director acknowledged that they do not have the necessary parts for a more extensive repair.
The shutdown was controlled to prevent fluctuations in the national electrical system, but the situation worsens an already critical scenario: the plant had been reconnected just on Thursday at 7:48 AM, after returning on Wednesday from its twelfth shutdown, which means that it did not complete 24 hours connected before failing again.
The engineer Román Pérez Castañeda, general director of the plant, explained to Radio 26 that the adopted technical decision is to continue selectively identifying the areas of greatest threat in the boiler and repairing them specifically.
"In this context, and also due to the impossibility of obtaining the necessary parts for a more extensive emergency repair, it has been decided to continue the strategy of selectively locating the areas of greatest threat in the boiler and making repairs," stated Pérez Castañeda.
The executive specified that, on this occasion, assisted cooling of the boiler is not advisable, but that the inspection could begin on Saturday night.
He also emphasized that the reported failures have not occurred in elements that were previously repaired, thus ruling out issues with the execution of the prior work.
However, the root of the problem is structural: “It is a significant technical challenge to detect hundreds of pipes that pose a threat, especially given that it is impossible to have the necessary quantity of pipes made of chrome steel and there is also no time to properly shape them,” the director acknowledged.
La Guiteras has been without a comprehensive major maintenance for over 15 years, as the last one was carried out in 2010, and it has accumulated nearly four decades of operation since its inauguration in 1988.
Pérez Castañeda himself has acknowledged that the plant requires a shutdown of approximately 180 days for thorough repairs, but the country's energy situation does not allow for this.
By 2026, it was planned to start a general maintenance program that would involve work on the boiler, generator, turbine, and auxiliary equipment, a goal that recurrent shutdowns have prevented from being achieved.
In parallel, two Cuban thermoelectric plants were taken offline this Friday: the Electric Union also announced the shutdown of the CTE Máximo Gómez unit 8, for unknown reasons, further complicating a system that projected a deficit of nearly 2,000 MW during peak hours on Thursday.
The worst deficit recorded this year occurred on May 14, when half of Cuba was left in the dark after another system failure, with a deficit of 2,174 MW and only 976 MW available throughout the country.
The thirteenth stoppage of the Guiteras in just one year confirms that the strategy of sporadic repairs does not address the accumulated deterioration: without the proper parts or time for thorough maintenance, the plant will continue to be the weakest link in an already strained electrical system.
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