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The Electric Union (UNE) confirmed this Friday that the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Power Plant (CTE), located in Matanzas, was synchronized with the National Electric System at 12:07 PM and continued to increase its load, as reported by the organization on its official Facebook page.
The return occurs six days after the 14th shutdown of the year for the plant, which took place in the early morning of last Saturday due to new water leaks in the boiler, just three days after it was synchronized on June 3.
The engineer Elmer García Romero, technical deputy director of Guiteras, explained on Thursday that after a hydraulic test lasting approximately six hours, only one weld remained to be completed and a radiological inspection of a leak in the boiler needed to be conducted before proceeding with the startup.
García Romero specified that in this repair, "the verifications were deepened not only in the economizer, responsible for the recent outages, but also a large number of heat exchange surfaces were supervised."
Despite the return, the integration of Guiteras into the system is partial: the UNE had projected its entry with only 100 MW during the nighttime peak on Friday, well below its maximum capacity of 300 MW, indicating that the plant has not yet reached its full potential.
The announcement comes amid the worst electrical crisis in recent history in Cuba, with a deficit that reached 2,027 MW at 8:00 PM on Thursday, triggering loud protests and demonstrations in Havana and other cities.
For this Friday, the UNE projected an impact of 1,720 MW during the peak nighttime hours, with an availability of only 1,310 MW against a demand of 3,000 MW. This marked a marginal improvement that depended precisely on the incorporation of Guiteras with 200 MW and unit two of the CTE Santa Cruz with 80 MW.
At 6:00 AM this Friday, the system's availability was only 1,030 MW compared to a demand of 2,590 MW, with 1,560 MW affected since dawn.
The structural situation of the plant is critical: it has gone more than 15 years without capital maintenance— the last one was in 2010— and it has experienced 14 system outages just in 2026 so far.
The director of the facility, Dr. Román Pérez Castañeda, has publicly acknowledged that the plant requires at least 180 days of shutdown for a comprehensive repair, an option that the authorities have dismissed as it would further exacerbate the deficit.
A complete repair of the boiler would involve addressing over 500 damaged tubes and executing between 1,000 and 1,200 welding seams, according to technical data from the installation itself.
The worst record of the year occurred on May 14, when the deficit reached 2,174 MW, while in provinces like Granma, power outages lasted between 45 and 48 consecutive hours during June.
The UNE warned that "if the expected conditions persist, a loss of 1,720 MW is forecasted" during the peak demand hours on this Friday, a figure that illustrates the magnitude of a crisis that the regime has been unable to reverse.
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