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The Antonio Guiteras Thermal Power Plant, the largest power generation facility in Cuba, was disconnected from the National Electroenergetic System this Friday for the seventeenth time in 2026, just four days after being reconnected.
The cause, once again, was a failure in the boiler economizer, the same component that has led to half of all the plant's shutdowns this year.
According to journalist José Miguel Solís reported on Facebook, specialists suspect that the economizer is still malfunctioning and final details are being prepared to undertake a new repair while awaiting the 48 hours required for the boiler to cool down.
The engineer Román Pérez Castañeda, general director of the yumurino block, explained that the intervention cannot be total. "At the moment, it is impossible to change all the components of the economizer, a task that requires significant time," he stated.
The executive was clear about the reasons for that limitation: "It's not that we lack the necessary pipes and the ability to install them, but rather that it is an intervention that would take several days, and right now, 200 megawatts are at stake."
The immediate plan is to resume inspection work on the boiler on Sunday morning, check for failures, and replace the faulty ducts. "We expect the work to take up to six days, starting from six in the morning this Friday," Pérez Castañeda clarified.
The repair will require the relocation of staff from the Maintenance company to Power Plants, as well as the design and planning for the replacement of damaged pipes and the inspection of additional areas that might present faults.
The economizer at Guiteras has accumulated 38 years of continuous operation in a highly corrosive environment, and the plant has not received capital maintenance since 2010. Experts estimate that a comprehensive repair would require replacing about 500 tubes and between 1,000 and 1,200 welds, with a shutdown of at least 180 days, an intervention that authorities have repeatedly postponed.
This is the fifth consecutive outage of the Guiteras due to failure in the same component, highlighting the structural deterioration that no partial repair has been able to resolve. The economizer is responsible for 50% of all plant shutdowns in 2026, accumulating 293 hours out of service between January and the end of May.
The new breakdown worsened the national electricity deficit to 2,206 MW, just two megawatts shy of the historical record of 2,208 MW set on June 25, 2026. Power outages in Cuba reach between 20 and 30 hours daily in Havana and up to 87 consecutive hours in Matanzas, a situation that has already triggered citizen protests in municipalities like Marianao with chants of "Freedom!".
The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, promised the capital maintenance of the Guiteras plant by the end of 2025, but postponed it in December of that year citing a "situational problem" and announced it again in April 2026 without setting a specific date, while the plant continues to operate based on temporary fixes on an infrastructure that has gone decades without substantial intervention.
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