A large fire broke out at Unit 1 of the Ernesto Guevara de la Serna Thermoelectric Power Plant, located in Santa Cruz del Norte, Mayabeque Province, according to a report from the Electric Union (UNE) through its official channels.
"The fire department is on-site working to extinguish the incident. There will be further updates," specified the UNE on its Facebook profile.
According to the report published by the state media Cubadebate, the fire started at 6:55 a.m., and the fire department responded to the scene to work on extinguishing it. The unit was taken offline immediately.
The blow to the already weakened National Electro-Energetic System (SEN) was immediate: availability dropped to 740 MW against a demand of 2,260 MW, with 1,540 MW affected from the early hours of the morning.
The projections for peak demand during nighttime hours are even more alarming. According to the UNE, a demand of 2,900 MW is anticipated, with availability remaining at the same 740 MW, which implies a deficit of 2,160 MW and a forecasted impact of 2,190 MW.
The simultaneous breakdown report at the time of the fire was extensive. In addition to the unit affected by the fire, the official report indicated that unit 2 of the CTE Santa Cruz, the unit from the CTE Guiteras in Matanzas, unit 2 of the CTE Felton in Holguín, and units 3 and 6 of the CTE Renté in Santiago de Cuba were also out of service. Additionally, three more units were undergoing maintenance at different plants across the country.
On Thursday, the situation was already critical before the fire. The service was affected for 24 hours, with a maximum impact of 2,094 MW at 7:30 PM, “exceeding what was planned,” as recognized by UNE itself, due to failures in units 3 and 4 of the CTE Cienfuegos and in unit 2 of the CTE Santa Cruz.
The Santa Cruz plant has a history of recurring outages throughout 2026: unit 1 went offline in February due to a malfunction, and in April and May due to failures in the turbine regulation system. In July, it was unit 2 that failed due to a porosity issue in the economizer, just an hour and a half after a unit from CTE Cienfuegos also went down, which was described as a domino effect among the thermoelectric plants.
The CTE Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, completed in 1991 using Soviet technology, has three generating units and an installed capacity of 295 MW. It operates with domestic crude oil, which avoids imports valued at approximately 400,000 dollars per day.
Cuba has recorded eight total disconnections from the National Electric System (SEN) so far in 2026, with the most recent occurring on September 18. With availability plummeting to 740 MW and an expected impact of more than 2,190 MW for the night of this Friday, millions of Cubans are facing power outages that in the previous days had already exceeded 20 continuous hours.
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