Cuba looks to sun to solve its energy crisis

Not removed from the ruins of an unfinished nuclear energy plant within the Cuban province of Cienfuegos, lots of of employees are unexpectedly putting in 44,000 photo voltaic panels because the island seeks as soon as once more to scale back its reliance on oil to escape an energy crisis.

Forty years in the past, the answer was thought to be Russian nuclear energy. This time, it’s the sun. With assist from China.

Dozens of containers with Chinese language inscriptions are lined up on the “La Yuca” photovoltaic park, the place forklifts loaded with photo voltaic panels weave between the concrete frames that may maintain them.

“We’re laying wires, digging trenches and putting in panels,” a employee on the undertaking, to be accomplished in Could, defined of the frenetic exercise.

Cuba, an island of some 10 million inhabitants, stays extremely depending on fossil fuels to function its eight outdated thermoelectric energy vegetation, most of them on-line for the reason that Eighties and ’90s and inclined to frequent breakdowns.

The communist authorities has authorized the development of 55 photo voltaic parks by 2025.

5 of them can be within the central province of Cienfuegos, that additionally hosts an industrial port and a refinery, and was chosen within the Eighties to host a Soviet-funded nuclear energy plant that was aborted mid-build when the USSR collapsed.

Cuba’s fragile electrical grid has gone offline 4 instances prior to now six months, plunging nearly all of the nation into darkness, generally for days on finish.

Many of the nation faces near-daily outages blamed primarily on gasoline shortages.

“Greater than half of all of the gasoline consumed by the nation goes in direction of electrical energy manufacturing,” Energy and Mines Minister Vicente de la O Levy just lately informed state-run newspaper Granma.

Hundreds of thousands of {dollars}

Many of the oil has come from Venezuela which, like Cuba, is underneath US sanctions and has seen the administration of President Donald Trump just lately revoke licenses that allowed transnational corporations to extract crude there.

The nation additionally makes use of floating electrical vegetation rented from a Turkish firm, and turbines fueled by crude oil at the same time as there may be not sufficient petrol for the island’s automobiles, tractors and ambulances.

The nation produces a couple of third of the gasoline it consumes, and buys the remainder.

De la O Levy has stated photo voltaic parks are on the coronary heart of Cuba’s renewable energy targets as a result of the “investments are cheaper, they’re constructed extra rapidly, and will be unfold all through the nation.”

The communist island, grappling with its worst financial crisis in a long time, goals to generate 12% of its energy from renewable sources by 2025 and 37% by 2030.

By the top of this 12 months, it hopes to produce 1,200 MW in photo voltaic energy per day—nearly equal to its each day electrical energy deficit of 1,500 MW.

The formidable undertaking requires an funding of a number of million {dollars}, and with few Western mates, Cuba has gladly accepted assist from what the presidency described in February as “the sister nation of #China.”

A complete value estimate has not been made public.

‘The quickest manner’

Simply 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) from “La Yuca” stands an imposing metal dome designed to shield what was going to be a nuclear reactor—the final large-scale try to change Cuba’s energy combine.

On its thick concrete partitions, Russian inscriptions are nonetheless seen.

The undertaking was canceled in 1992 by then-president Fidel Castro after the autumn of the USSR, a Cuban ally, which had largely financed the undertaking and offered physicists and engineers.

Eliecer Machin, a thermophysicist skilled within the USSR who nonetheless lives within the “nuclear metropolis” constructed to home the personnel of the would-be energy plant, recollects the “laborious blow” when it was shuttered.

The 60-year-old now makes a dwelling as a pig farmer.

Immediately, because of errors made prior to now, he stated, photo voltaic is “the quickest manner to acquire energy.”

College of Texas researcher Jorge Pinon stated the photo voltaic energy would imply little if Cuba would not have batteries to retailer it to be used in intervals of darkness.

© 2025 AFP