Cuban power grid collapses for fourth time as hurricane arrives
Patrick Oppmann, CNN
Sun 20 October 2024
Residents pass the time during a blackout following the failure of a major power plant in Havana, Cuba, on Saturday, Oct. 19, 2024.
Millions of Cubans remained without power for a third day in a row Sunday after fresh attempts to restore electricity failed overnight and the power grid collapsed for the fourth time – all before the arrival of Hurricane Oscar.
The Cuban Electrical Union said about 16% of the country had had power restored when the aging energy grid again overloaded late Saturday, and according to the local state-run power company more than 216,000 people in the capital of Havana, a city of 2 million, had power restored Sunday afternoon.
However, later Sunday afternoon, the power grid collapsed again, for the fourth time since Friday.
At a news conference on Sunday, Energy and Mines Minister Vicente de la O Levy said 52,000 power workers were trying to restore service but the arrival of Hurricane Oscar in eastern Cuba would likely hamper their efforts.
Hurricane Oscar made landfall near Baracoa in eastern Cuba around 5:50 p.m. EDT as a Category 1 storm with winds of 80 mph.
Earlier, Oscar made landfall on Inagua Island in The Bahamas, with maximum estimated sustained winds of 80 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center on Sunday.
Cuba’s first islandwide blackout happened on Friday, when one of the country’s major power plants failed, according to the Energy Ministry. Most people in the 10 million-strong country have had their access to power interrupted since then.
Hours after officials said power was being slowly restored, the country suffered a second nationwide blackout on Saturday morning.
The blackouts threaten to plunge the communist-run nation into a deeper crisis. Water supply and keeping food fresh are both dependent on reliable power.
Havana residents queue for bread
Some people began flooding WhatsApp chats with updates on which areas had power, while others arranged to store medications in the fridges of those who briefly had power – or were lucky enough to have a generator.
In Havana, residents waited for hours to buy a few loaves from the handful of locations selling bread in the capital. When the bread sold out, several people argued angrily that they had been skipped in line.
Many wondered aloud where Cuba’s traditional allies were, such as Venezuela, Russia and Mexico. Until now, they had been supplying the island with badly needed barrels of oil to keep the lights on.
Meanwhile, tourists were still seen circling Havana’s main avenues in classic 1950s cars, although many hotel generators had run out of fuel.
One foreign visitor told CNN that Havana’s José Martí International Airport was operating in the dark on emergency power only, adding that printers did not work to issue tickets and there was no air conditioning in the terminal.
Reuters reporters witnessed two small protests overnight into Sunday, while videos of protests elsewhere in the capital have also surfaced.
The Cuban government is cancelling classes for students from Monday until Wednesday, having previously cancelled them on Friday. It has also instructed non-essential workers to stay home. The US Embassy in Havana will be open only for emergency services on Monday.
Cuban officials have blamed the energy crisis on a confluence of events, from increased US economic sanctions to disruptions caused by recent hurricanes and the impoverished state of the island’s infrastructure.
In a televised address on Thursday that was delayed by technical difficulties, Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz said much of the country’s limited production was stopped to avoid leaving people completely without power.
“We have been paralyzing economic activity to generate (power) to the population,” he said.
The country’s health minister, José Angel Portal Miranda, said Friday on X that the country’s health facilities were running on generators and that health workers continued to provide vital services.
CNN’s Mia Alberti, Gene Norman, Rob Shackelford and CNN en Español’s Verónica Calderón and Gerardo Lemos contributed to this report.
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
Ruaridh Nicoll in Havana
Sun 20 October 2024
Habaneros on their balconies escape the heat inside while waiting for power to return to the city.Photograph: Norlys Perez/Reuters
Dusk has become a particularly frenetic time in Havana, as Cuba prepared for a third night potentially without electricity after repeated failed attempts to restart the national grid.
Long queues formed for bread in the capital earlier in the day. The previous night, people had emerged from humid homes to search for food, drink, news. “What’s the point of staying at home?” asked Alejandro Hernandez outside a bar in the neighbourhood of Vedado.
Throughout Sunday, much of the island started to receive electricity again, although no one knows if the night could bring another collapse in power, as it had done each night over the weekend.
Jokes, a staple of Cubans’ increasingly difficult lives, are growing more acid. “Turn the Morro back on,” people say of Havana’s lighthouse. “We haven’t all left yet.” The island has lost over 10% of its population in the last two years to emigration, well more than 1 million people.
It has become dangerous to walk the streets at night but not because of violence, rather the crumbling pavements and open drains.
The problem is that the Cuban government has run out of money. This has made power cuts of up to 20 hours a day a regular experience across the island, as the state struggles to buy enough fuel on the global markets for its five main thermoelectric power plants.
The lack of money has led to water shortages as pumps and pipes fail, rubbish piling up on street corners as collections are cut, and hunger as food prices soar.
Cuba blames its six-decade embargo by the US for its penurious state. On Friday, Miguel Díaz-Canel, Cuba’s president, referred to “the cruellest blockade”. Others, such as the respected economist Pedro Monreal, contest this, asserting that one of the world’s last centrally planned communist states has moved from sclerotic to moribund. “It is a bankruptcy caused by internal decisions,” he wrote online.
But it was a call made by the government on Thursday for all nonessential workers in its vast bureaucracy to go home and save energy that heralded this latest crisis, one unprecedented except in times when the island receives direct hit from hurricanes.
The move did not save the electrical grid, which collapsed just after 11am on Friday. The main generating station, in Matanzas, went offline. Only those who had personal generators had light.
Since then repeated attempts by Cuba’s Union Electrica to get the grid up and running have failed. Light would appear in certain neighbourhoods, often around hospitals. But then, on Saturday at 6am and again at 10pm, the electricity went out across swathes of the country with an unnerving thump.
At 4.30pm on Sunday, the system collapsed again.
As engineers try to restore the system, the hardest-hit area has been Cuba’s west, including Havana. This has come as a shock to residents as the city has traditionally been saved from the worst, the government fearing protests. In July 2021, Cuba suffered its worst protests in memory as a demonstration against power cuts in a town west of Havana spread.
In a Caribbean country struggling to feed itself, power cuts can be particularly terrible. Without fans, night-time temperatures can keep people from sleeping, and a lack of electricity means food goes off in refrigerators. People are phoning family and friends to ask them if they have anywhere to store the small rations of meat the state gives to the most vulnerable.
During this latest crisis, the government has tried to keep the population informed. Leading figures in the government announced the initial collapse of the electricity system on X. That led to worldwide headlines, confounding an already ailing tourism industry, one of the state’s main sources of foreign funds.
A photograph was released on a government media channel showing Díaz Canel and his team standing behind two technicians in the office of the National Electricity Office. To one side was Ramiro Valdés, a former vice-president, now 92.
All five of the country’s main plants are close to half a century old. According to Jorge Piñon, an expert on Cuba’s power system at the university of Texas, they are far beyond their planned lifespans.
Manuel Marrero, Cuba’s prime minister, has called for a shift to renewables and for the country’s growing private sector to pay more for the power it uses.
Despite the government’s messages that its technicians are working “incessantly”, comments under articles in CubaDebate, a state media outlet, show people’s anger. “This shouldn’t happen,” wrote a resident of Plaza, the neighbourhood of Havana named after the Plaza de la Revolucion. “Millions of people without electricity or water. What are all the explanations worth?”
On Saturday night, long after dusk, the streets of the Havana neighbourhood of Vedado were all but empty. The few people out were rushing home, only two members of an army patrol sauntering slowly.
What to know about the electrical grid failure that plunged Cuba into darkness
ANDREA RODRIGUEZ
Updated Sun 20 October 2024
APTOPIX Cuba Power Outage
A woman prepares to catch a tossed frisbee during a massive blackout after a major power plant failed in Havana, Cuba, Friday, Oct. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)
HAVANA (AP) — Millions of people in Cuba were left without electricity for two days after the nation's energy grid went down when one of the island's major power plants failed. The widespread blackout that swept across the county was the worst in years.
Authorities have restored power to some people in Cuba’s capital, where 2 million people live, but much of Havana has remained dark. The impact of the blackout goes beyond lighting, as services like water supply also depend on electricity to run pumps.
People have resorted to cooking with improvised wood stoves on the streets before their food went bad in refrigerators.
Here are a few things to know:
What happened and why?
About half of Cuba was plunged into darkness on Thursday evening, followed by the entire island on Friday morning after the failure of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant in Matanzas Province east of Havana.
Even in a country that for decades has been accustomed to frequent outages amid a series of economic crises, the grid failure was unprecedented in modern times, aside from incidents involving powerful hurricanes, such as one in 2022.
Even as Cuba worked to fix the power problems Saturday, the country issued hurricane watches for the far eastern Guantanamo, Holguin and Las Tunas provinces as a tropical storm developed into Hurricane Oscar, the 10th hurricane of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season.
The National Hurricane Center said Sunday that Oscar was expected to produce a dangerous storm surge in parts of the southeastern Bahamas and Cuba
Authorities said the outage that began Thursday stemmed from increased demand from small- and medium-sized companies and residences’ air conditioners — as many as 100,000 additional ones this year alone. They also blamed breakdowns in old thermoelectric plants that haven’t been properly maintained because of a lack of hard currency due to U.S. sanctions, as well as insufficient fuel to operate some facilities.
Has this happened before?
While some homes have spent up to eight hours a day this year without electricity as the grid has grown more unstable, the current power failure is considered Cuba’s worst in years.
Officials said that 1.64 gigawatts went offline during peak hours, about half the total demand at the time. The government implemented emergency measures to slash demand, suspended classes, and shut down some state-owned workplaces and canceled non-essential services.
Another major collapse occurred two years ago after Hurricane Ian, an intense Category 3 storm, damaged power installations and the government took days to fix them.
Any political consequences?
It's unknown how Cubans will react if the current blackout endures or recurs.
But problems in the electrical grid have helped sparked street protests several times in recent years, including large demonstrations in July 2021 that led to international criticism of the government for its harsh response. There were also smaller demonstrations due to blackouts in October 2022 and March of this year.
Authorities now say changes to electricity rates for small- and medium-sized companies, which have proliferated since they were first authorized by the communist government in 2021, are being considered.
What's next?
Officials said the state-owned power company UNE was using distributed generation to provide power to some areas of the island and that a gas-fired thermoelectric plant was starting operations.
Cuba gets its power from huge thermoelectric plants like Antonio Guiteras and some smaller ones, which require crude oil to operate. The country produces about half of the crude needed, but must purchase some of the rest on the international market, which can be difficult and costly due to U.S. sanctions. It has also depended on allies like Venezuela and Russia for cheaper fuel.
Authorities have been working since last year on a project to upgrade the island’s electrical grid through the use of alternative power sources. A project to build 31 centers generating solar energy is under way and projected to be completed next year.
“We are devoting absolute priority to addressing and solving this highly sensitive energy contingency,” Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote on X. “There will be no rest until its restoration.”
____
Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america
Cuba grid collapses again, hurricane heaps on misery
Dave Sherwood
Updated Sun 20 October 2024
Cuba making slow progress re-starting power after second grid collapse
HAVANA (Reuters) -Cuba's electrical grid collapsed again on Sunday, the fourth such failure in 48 hours, with a hurricane making landfall to compound the island's misery and threaten further havoc on its decrepit infrastructure.
Cuba earlier on Sunday had said it was making headway restoring service after multiple false starts, though millions of people remained without electricity more than two days after the grid's initial collapse.
"Restoration work began immediately," the country's energy and mines ministry said on X.
Hurricane Oscar made landfall on the Caribbean island on Sunday, bringing strong winds, a powerful storm surge and rain to parts of eastern Cuba and threatening to further complicate the government's efforts to reestablish service.
Cuba's meteorological survey warned of "an extremely dangerous situation" in eastern Cuba, while the U.S. National Hurricane Center reported winds of 75 miles per hour (120 kph) as the storm made its way across the island.
"On the forecast track, the center of Oscar is expected to continue moving across eastern Cuba tonight and Monday, then emerge off the northern coast of Cuba late Monday and cross the central Bahamas on Tuesday," the Hurricane Center said.
The Communist-run government canceled school through Wednesday - a near unprecedented move in Cuba - citing the hurricane and the ongoing energy crisis. Officials said only essential workers should report to work on Monday.
The repeated grid collapses marked a major setback in the government's efforts to quickly restore power to exhausted residents already suffering from severe shortages of food, medicine and fuel.
The multiple setbacks in the first 48 hours also underscored the complexity of the work and the still precarious state of the country's grid.
Cuba had restored power to 160,000 clients in Havana just prior to the grid's Sunday collapse, giving some residents a glimmer of hope.
But housewife Anabel Gonzalez, of old Havana, a neighborhood popular with tourists, said she was growing desperate after three days without power.
"My cell phone is dead and look at my refrigerator. The little that I had has all gone to waste," she said, pointing to bare shelves in her two-room home.
Energy and mines minister Vicente de la O Levy told reporters earlier on Sunday he expected the grid to be fully functional by Monday or Tuesday but warned residents not to expect dramatic improvements.
It was not immediately clear how much the latest setback would delay the government's efforts.
Cuba's national electrical grid first crashed around midday on Friday after the island's largest power plant shut down, sowing chaos. The grid collapsed again on Saturday morning, state-run media reported.
By early evening on Saturday, authorities reported some progress restoring power before announcing another partial grid collapse.
RISING TENSIONS
Reuters reporters witnessed two small protests overnight after a grid failure left Havana in the dark late Saturday, one on the outskirts of the capital in Marianao and the other in the more central Cuatro Caminos. Various videos of protests elsewhere in the capital began to crop up on social media late on Saturday, though Reuters was not able to verify their authenticity.
Energy Minister O Levy said the blackouts were bothersome to residents, but he said most Cubans understood and supported government efforts to restore power.
"It is Cuban culture to cooperate," O Levy told reporters on Sunday. "Those isolated and minimal incidents that do exist, we catalog them as incorrect, as indecent."
Internet traffic dropped off sharply in Cuba over the weekend, according to data from internet monitoring group NetBlocks, as vast power outages made it all but impossible for most island residents to charge phones and get online.
"Network data show that Cuba remains largely offline as the island experiences a second nationwide power outage," Netblocks said on Saturday.
The government has blamed weeks of worsening blackouts - as long as 10 to 20 hours a day across much of the island - on deteriorating infrastructure, fuel shortages and rising demand.
Cuba also blames the U.S. trade embargo, as well as sanctions instituted by then-President Donald Trump, for ongoing difficulties in acquiring fuel and spare parts to operate and maintain its oil-fired plants.
The U.S. has denied any role in the grid failures.
Cuba depends on imports to feed its largely obsolete, oil-fired power plants. Fuel deliveries to the island have dropped significantly this year as Venezuela, Russia and Mexico, once important suppliers, have slashed their exports to Cuba.
Ally Venezuela - struggling to supply its own market - cut by half its deliveries of subsidized fuel to Cuba this year, forcing the island to search for more costly oil on the spot market.
Mexico, another frequent supplier, appeared also to have cut fuel flows to Cuba during a presidential election year.
Recently elected President Claudia Sheinbaum has not said if the state-supported supply to Cuba will continue under same terms under her administration.
(Reporting by Dave Sherwood; additional reporting by Marc Frank, Carlos Carrillo and Nelson Acosta in Havana and Marianna Parraga in Houston; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Stephen Coates)
No comments:
Post a Comment