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The official profile of the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Power Plant in Matanzas reported this Tuesday that welding work is ongoing in the damaged area of the plant, while maintenance and painting tasks are being carried out simultaneously, taking advantage of the shutdown.
According to the update released by Periódico Girón, once the welding work is completed, a hydraulic test will be conducted to check for leaks, and preventive inspections are being carried out on the pipes adjacent to the damaged area.
The plant stopped for the fourteenth time in 2026 at midnight on Friday, June 6, due to water leaks in the boiler.
The director of the facility, Doctor in Sciences Román Pérez Castañeda, confirmed the malfunction and warned that approximately 36 hours of cooling were needed before entering the boiler to locate the damage, design the repair, and carry it out with quality control and hydraulic testing.
At the time of the shutdown, the exact cause of the failure was still unknown. "It is a technical problem that we will resolve with knowledge and work; that is what we are doing, increasing control methods and investigating the causes, because right now we do not know the reason for this shutdown," declared Pérez Castañeda to the newspaper Juventud Rebelde.
The power plant stopped again just days after being reconnected to the system on Thursday, June 4 at 7:48 a.m., failing once more before completing 24 hours of operation.
The ongoing repairs include 95 additional maintenance actions. In the previous intervention, conducted in early June, 544 weld seams were inspected, of which 172 were repaired, and thickness was measured at over 850 points, leading to the replacement of five miter beams.
The structural framework of the plant is critical: Guiteras has not received major maintenance since 2010, accumulating 16 years without a thorough intervention. A comprehensive repair of the boiler would involve over 500 damaged tubes and between 1,000 and 1,200 weld beads.
The director himself has acknowledged that the plant needs a shutdown of at least 180 days for major repairs, an option that the Cuban authorities have dismissed as it would further worsen the national electricity deficit. A plant engineer admitted that they do not have all the necessary parts for a more extensive repair, including chrome steel pipes.
The impact of this new outage adds to a severe electrical crisis: on June 6, the National Electro-Energy System recorded only 1,090 MW available against a demand of 3,050 MW, with a projected deficit of 1,960 MW during peak hours.
"Unfortunately, we have faced repeated breakdowns, but we cannot blame the workers, neither for poor operation nor for low-quality work; it has been the result of the continuous exploitation of the boiler for a long time," acknowledged Pérez Castañeda, who dismissed any responsibility of the staff in the recurring failures.
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