The Electric Company of Ciego de Ávila announced this Saturday a progress in reducing power outages in the province to around 20 hours a day, after the local grid managed to receive up to 18 MW of supply during the day, according to the state newspaper Invasor.
The company's statement acknowledged that this is merely "a slight improvement in the conditions of the National Electric System compared to the previous day," but warned that this progress "is not enough to reverse a critical scenario that is expected to be more severe during peak demand hours."
The starting point makes the celebration quite revealing: on Friday, the same company had acknowledged that Ciego de Ávila was only receiving 12 MW and that the accumulated outages from circuits had exceeded 40 hours in the two previous days.
The entity also acknowledged that, as long as the situation persists, "it is impossible to implement a schedule for outages," so the circuits will receive electricity for blocks of just one hour and 30 minutes, prioritizing those that have been without service the longest and as the conditions of the National Electric System allow at any given time.
The collapse in Ciego de Ávila is part of a national crisis of extreme proportions. This Saturday, the Electric Union reported a capacity of only 970 MW against a demand of 2,800 MW, resulting in a deficit of 1,830 MW with an estimated impact of 1,860 MW during the nighttime peak.
The accelerated deterioration of the large thermal power plants accounts for a significant portion of the collapse. The Antonio Guiteras plant, located in Matanzas, went offline on November 11 due to a leak in the economizer of the boiler, resulting in a loss of about 180 MW. Two days later, the Ernesto Guevara de la Serna thermal power plant became completely out of service after the failure of its last operational unit, adding nearly 295 MW more in losses. The Felton plant, located in Holguín, had been non-operational for approximately three weeks.
On Friday, the national electricity service had been interrupted for 24 hours, with a maximum impact of 1,912 MW recorded at 6:20 PM.
The situation in Ciego de Ávila has been marked by months of ongoing deterioration. In August, the company admitted that areas of La Piñera and Serafín Sánchez Cuarta had gone over 10 days without electricity due to damaged transformers and a lack of spare parts, while receiving more than 100 daily reports of outages but could only address between 55 and 75.
The province has nine photovoltaic parks with an installed capacity of up to 108 MW, against a provincial demand of about 130 MW, but solar generation is not sufficient to reverse the crisis, especially at night or on cloudy days.
Structural failures are compounded by the theft of critical components: on Friday, five individuals were sentenced for stealing 600 liters of dielectric oil from a transformer at the Cítrico Uno substation, leaving nearly 1,750 customers from four rural communities in the province without service.
That reducing blackouts to 20 hours a day is presented as good news illustrates, better than any figure, the depth of the energy crisis that Ciego de Ávila and the rest of Cuba are experiencing.
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