Cuba's grid goes offline with blackout after a major power plant fails

https://apnews.com/article/cuba-power-outage-blackout-4ae305120a99fec17c79e7621e8dac4b

by kevinday • 2 years ago

86 102 2 years ago

apnews.com

gnabgib• 2 years ago

Discussion (20 points, 7 hours ago, 15 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41883162

throwaway199956• 2 years ago

Some further updates:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/cuba-power-grid-1.7356496

It appears power is being restored atleast in some parts.

Also airports and flight operations seems not to have been affected.

ocschwar2• 2 years ago

Lead times for new infrastructure on the grid is an 18 month minimum. This is going to stay bad for a long time.

voidfunc• 2 years ago

Maybe it will lead to regime change then. Cuba deserves better.

citrin_ru• 2 years ago

Poor economy rarely causes regime change in a dictatorship. North Korea is doing worse and yet regime is stable.

iwontberude• 2 years ago

Couldn't China pull up a big floating power generation barge for them?

sam1r• 2 years ago

For situations such as these, I wonder why isn't there a lookup table with key value pairings such as <China, X Billion(s)>

Scoundreller• 2 years ago

This is assuming their issue is the electricity plants and not fuel supply

ocschwar2• 2 years ago

America has 12 nuclear aircraft carriers. 3 of them would be enough to light up the island.

vivzkestrel• 2 years ago

stupid question: cuba is a hot country that supposedly receives plenty of sunlight throughout the year, why hasn't there been a solar initiative for every house or something along those lines?

tgcordell• 2 years ago

Probably the same reason it hasn’t happened in the majority of countries with similar solar opportunity.

geuis• 2 years ago

Solar installations in capital societies have taken off due to initial government and private sector investment.

Despite Cuba opening up over the last decade, there's still not good investment infrastructure to support large scale solar and wind installations. In other words, it's still a semi communist government that leans much more towards Soviet style versus China.

The article itself talks a bit about how the general electrical infrastructure in the country is aging and needs maintenance and upgrades.

Combine the government policies, general economy, hostility to foreign investment, etc and you hopefully get an idea of why solar hasn't had a major impact.

rapsey2• 2 years ago

You can't just have every house pushing 10 kW of power into a grid that is not provisioned for it.

Quothling2• 2 years ago

I don't think it's a stupid question. Cuba is increasing their solar energy, as far as I know they plan to increase their 200 something MW to 2 or 3 GW over the next 4-5 years. There are a lot of challenges in doing that though, one of them is the US. We build (or buy and upgrade) solar plants around the globe but we wouldn't risk the US market over going into Cuba. I doubt we're the only ones. Then there is the question of funding, which I would guess is an issue if they can't pay for the fossil fuels needed to keep their fossil fuel power plants running.

Considering the recent crisis seem to have been caused by lack of maintenance solar is probably a good option for Cuba as it doesn't require much. Once you set up a park it'll work for 25 years at least and even continue working for decades afterwards on tolerable levels. You'll need to do greenfield work and replace a panel once in a while, but a lot of parks can be almost left alone from an engineering perspective.

This is a bit of a side note, but heat isn't a benefit. I know we tend to think of hot areas which get a lot of sun as good places for solar plants, but today's solar tech loses a lot of efficiency to heat in temperatures above 25 degrees celsius. By a lot I mean that we don't even build parks in areas that go above 20-25 degrees if there are no outside incentives like green tariffs or NGO support.

throwaway5752• 2 years ago

This is a bit of a side note, but heat isn't a benefit. I know we tend to think of hot areas which get a lot of sun as good places for solar plants, but today's solar tech loses a lot of efficiency to heat in temperatures above 25 degrees celsius. By a lot I mean that we don't even build parks in areas that go above 20-25 degrees if there are no outside incentives like green tariffs or NGO support.

Would you be willing to post some references on this? I trust you know what you're talking about, but I'd like to read more. I thought 25 deg C or 77 deg F was the peak efficiency temperature and typical panels slowly lost efficiency on either side that. I didn't know of anywhere in the continental US that was always below 20-25 C.

rapsey2• 2 years ago

They also get hurricanes regularly though.

lalaland11252• 2 years ago

Cuba has no money to purchase said solar panels.

China, the main seller of solar, has publicly stated that Cuba is not paying their bills

https://www.ft.com/content/9ca0a495-d5d9-4cc5-acf5-43f42a912...

catlikesshrimp4• 2 years ago

Can you share the article with a non-subscriber?

Edit: the name of the article is catchy: "China is not Cuba’s sugar daddy’: ties between communist nations weaken"

Edit2: This is a summary of the FT article in spanish by a cuban newspaper. I suppose the most important arguments and data are included here https://www.14ymedio.com/internacional/china-senala-falta-vo...

Edit3: Thanks for the transcript. And someone shared the article here https://archive.ph/tz2Sf

K0balt2• 2 years ago

It’s unfortunate that Cuba is so reliant on inefficient oil fired plants. Solar power could easily cover their needs if it weren’t for the economic and sanctions situation. I feel like we will be seeing this bloom into a more political situation before too long.

xvector• 2 years ago

Nothing is stopping them from trading with China.

K0balt2• 2 years ago

Except that they don’t have anything to trade lol.

gigatexal• 2 years ago

It would be a really good opportunity for the US to go and offer to help. It would be huge for diplomacy between the two countries. Send sec. Pete over with his infrastructure expertise and let’s help modernize their grid and build better relations.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste or something along those lines.

einszwei3• 2 years ago

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/where-to-watch-the-debateand-...

The best thing US could do is relax the decades long sanctions on Cuba (which almost the whole world opposes)

perihelions• 2 years ago

How is it in the US' interest to help a Russian ally operate their oil-fired power plant–one that's running on Russian oil?

tamaharbor• 2 years ago

1.64 gigawatts!

lalaland11252• 2 years ago

Cuba has been going through a crazy major decline ever since COVID. It's pretty rare for a mostly developed country to collapse into poverty without a war.

Roughly 5% of the population is fleeing the island each year: https://miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cub...

_2d3011• 2 years ago

It's pretty rare for a mostly developed country to collapse into poverty without a war.

Since when was Cuba, post Castro, anything other than impoverished?

ketzo• 2 years ago

That’s not fundamentally wrong, but you are missing the degree of change. Shit has gotten so bad, so fast, relative to what it was before.

93po• 2 years ago

i would describe US sanctions as economic warfare

einszwei3• 2 years ago

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/where-to-watch-the-debateand-...

Sanctions on Cuba have strangled their economy and spread misery among the population.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/11/1143112

US is almost alone in spearheading the embargo.

catlikesshrimp4• 2 years ago

What can Cuba offer? Same problem with Haiti, what can Haiti offer? Not even China seems interested in paying peanuts for them (The way they are buying Nicaragua and Venezuela)

0xbadcafebee2• 2 years ago

Cuba's exports are $2B, Haiti's exports are $63M. They are a little different.

einszwei3• 2 years ago

Their main economic source was tourism which US has successfully strangled (rolling back the relaxation from Obama era)

https://www.yahoo.com/news/travellers-visited-cuba-last-11-1...

excalibur• 2 years ago

I hear their cigars are pretty good

moribvndvs• 2 years ago

They can offer being humans.

thatcat• 2 years ago

quality medical care

Gud• 2 years ago

They have a lot to offer.

Why don’t we let the markets decide?

exitb2• 2 years ago

What could communist Poland of late 80s offer? It’s a shame that USA cannot help their neighborhood into a better economic position.

huuhee32• 2 years ago

Cuba is a pretty popular tourist destination, if nothing else. Cigars and rum are pretty big exports too. Definitely in another league compared to Haiti, as even communism beats anarchy.

serial_dev• 2 years ago

The economic model and decisions of Cuba is a terrible idea and could never work.

To show you how confident we are in this, we will engineer the harshest economic hit job and we will sanction the sh out of them, and every other country that tries something similar.

Respectfully, the US and its lackeys

dkarras• 2 years ago

the point is, if your economic model cannot survive / adapt to the environment it is living in, is it viable? Cuba froze itself in time decades ago, is it just the embargoes? Why do they need capitalist trade to go a single step forward?

_2d3011• 2 years ago

So you just made up a rationale for the embargo that's completely divorced from reality and then dunked on it? This would play great on Twitter or Reddit, you should post there as well.

The embargo doesn't exist because the US is correct in its assessment that Cuba's economic system won't succeed, an opinion shared by Cuba's largest trading partner: https://www.ft.com/content/9ca0a495-d5d9-4cc5-acf5-43f42a912...

immibis2• 2 years ago

Second harshest - Gaza has worse.

bpodgursky2• 2 years ago

If the US is "almost alone", it shouldn't matter that the US isn't trading with Cuba. It's an island, there are plenty of countries they could trade with.

Cuba is collapsing because of failed economic policies and the resulting emigration.

portaouflop5• 2 years ago

It’s both really

pjmlp4• 2 years ago

No there isn't, the selection is reduced to those that couldn't care less about US, as anyone that dares to trade with Cuba is also affected in their US trade.

chgs• 2 years ago

I can’t go to Cuba without making it far harder to go to America. I can’t easily do business was with both freely, I have to choose.

pragmomm• 2 years ago

A Chinese poster complaining about US going against Cuba, when China is Cuba's second largest trading partner and an important ally, what a surprise.

China's Xi vows to support Cuba in defending its national sovereignty https://www.reuters.com/world/chinas-xi-vows-support-cuba-de...

ben_w• 2 years ago

China is almost everyone's top-5 trading partner by imports, and half the world by exports, according to the CIA World Fact Book.

The other way around, China puts Taiwan (the closest China has to its own Cuba) on a list of major countries with 291 bn USD* whereas Cuba's total with everyone put together was estimated to be 4.6 bn USD in 2017.

* http://guangzhou.customs.gov.cn/customs/302249/zfxxgk/279982...

_2d3011• 2 years ago

Undoubtedly the US embargo and its extension of potential sanctions to foreign entities which violate are in part causes of a weak economy.

However, this is an incomplete picture. Cuba has essentially no market economy whatsoever. All evidence throughout history shows this is economic suicide and is undoubtedly an even larger cause of their issues. It's so bad that in the FT this week (https://www.ft.com/content/9ca0a495-d5d9-4cc5-acf5-43f42a912...) this incredible line is written:

"Chinese officials have been perplexed and frustrated at the Cuban leadership’s unwillingness to decisively implement a market-oriented reform programme despite the glaring dysfunction of the status quo, the people said."

That's the CHINESE (Marxist at least in name) government lamenting the lack of Cuban adoption of market principles.

Further, the article makes quite clear that the US Embargo, for whatever it is worth, doesn't extend to the entire world (which should be obvious) noting very specific relations with multiple major Chinese companies. So even though Cuba is clearly able to trade with the second largest economy in the world (with giant enterpries like Huawei and ZTE), with a population of greater than 1B, they are still somehow completely incapable of operating a function al economy.

What's more, a cursory understanding of Cuban history should show that they are avowedly enemies of the US having once attempted to host nuclear missiles aimed at the US. What is the US to do? Actively support a regime which has threatened tens of millions of its people?

christianqchung• 2 years ago

If Cuba is our ally, they're not going to be China's ally. See Vietnam, which we also had some rocky relations with. It's too late to change things with Cuba now though, Obama tried and failed, so Cuba will be in eternal decline until another revolution.

oldnetguy• 2 years ago

Cuba can trade with anyone else. They trade with Canada for heck sake.

They have the whole world, their economy shouldn't need us.

Let them work with China and see how well that works out

pjmlp4• 2 years ago

No they cannot, as US imposes sanction on any country that defies the embargo, so Cuba ends up trading with those that couldn't care less about US embargos.

tomjen3• 2 years ago

It does nothing good or useful, but Cuba is a communist country. Such a country will always have shortages, and those will continue to get worse.

ahoka• 2 years ago

It’s more of a function of a hard line Soviet style planned economy. China is doing great since they let go of that. Economically speaking, of course.

sershe• 2 years ago

Man, I wish the sanctions would be lifted just so that the leftists holding these countries hostage, and their fellow travelers, don't have an excuse for running them into the ground because they believe in the worst ideology in history.

Cuba trades just fine with China, EU, Canada even, not even considering South America. The numbers are out there. Also countries like Venezuela were not nearly as heavily sanctioned and yet they speed-ran the left playbook to run their economy into the ground in record time. On the other hand, somehow sanctions didn't do much to damage Russian internal economy, as much as I wish they did - probably because even mafiosos and strongmen are not as dumb as leftists. OTOH^2 economically illiterate Erdogan was able to make lira crash without any sanctions. That was from just one stupid idea, whereas leftism is a whole stupid system.

Also, why should they need trade to provide basic services that most countries provide locally? Forget power, Cuba is/was one of the major, and most famous, tobacco producers. A middle-aged US man once told me he often goes on vacations to Cuba (flying thru Canada), because "girls there will sleep with you for a pack of American cigarettes". The regime is so incompetent they cannot even provide basic local goods that require ~no trade.

justinko• 2 years ago

Incompetency 100 times over.

cottsak• 2 years ago

Turns out a 330MW problem only costs about $300M to solve https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design

What a world we live in!

ikekkdcjkfke• 2 years ago

Retro cars though

pack_stimulus• 2 years ago

Commies bringing misery to people unfortunate enough to be subject to their governance: hardly shocking. Commie apologists complaining about US sanctions: pathetic.

crummy• 2 years ago

I'm not an American so not educated on this. Are the sanctions considered successful? What are their goals?

AuryGlenz• 2 years ago

The sanctions are nothing most Americans ever think of, apart from maybe Cuban cigars being exotic or hard to procure - though I feel like that was more of a thing 30+ years ago.

The goal was Cuba was openly hostile to the US and so we swung our large economic …stick, around. They took our assets and then held nuclear missiles for the Soviet Union during the Cold War, essentially putting them incredibly close to our shores.

They’re lucky the US didn’t do more, frankly.

maxglute• 2 years ago

IMO Cuba has nothing going for it except geography and sugar.

- Sugar = historic / principle natural resource exports for FX to fund imports since island has not much else (except doctors)

- Geography before USSR = next to US, good for USSR military posture -> support + handouts during cold war

- Geography after USSR collapse = nice place to vacation, again FX to fund imports

IIRC Castro pivoted from sugar to tourism post USSR collapse... and it worked alright. Look up charts for decline in sugar displaced by more tourism increase post 90s. GDP growing pretty steady. Wasn't going to make Cuba high income, but can kind of see how tourism driven model might work. Problem is of course global drop in demand = bad for tourism. Cuba international arrivals precovid about ~4.5m, last year was ~1.5m = empty FX for imports.

The big long term problem with tourism strategy... 300m+ American's not travelling to Cuba.

The short/medium term fix is Canadians, who consistuted something stupid like 40% of inbound tourists (~4.5m = ~2m tourists/vistors + ~2.5m stopovers) to Cuba, ~1M+ per year. Canadian tourists down to 600k. Which is partly due to Canadian economy. But also... it's been 20+ years of cheap Canadian flights to Cuba... at some point every Canadian that wants to goto Cuba has gone to Cuba. And really we're talking about 60% of Canadians living ~4 hour flight from Cuba. There isn't another advanced economy in the region to pick up slack. Except US... with even less travel time. So it's true Cuba can trade with lots of countries, many like Canada who despite US alignment, don't agree with US sanctions. But Cuba's got nothing significant to trade (enough to fund FX that can cover imports) for except nice weather, which is constrained to the amount of people who want to pay for nice Cuban weather, which happens to be a lot of Canadians. Everyone else short flight away has nice weather of their own.

A Chinese isn't going to pay $1500+ to fly (more importantly) 30 hours to Havanna.

If Cuba wants to get anywhere, it needs to make nice with US, and US tourists. Compare to Dominican Repubic... basically Cuba population and ~2M+ extra tourists per year, but that 2M+ are US tourists, and DR per capita is upper middle income.

OR Cuba needs to convince PRC to be sugar daddy like USSR. Cuba in mid 2010s imported "only" a couple billion... i.e. it doesn't take much imports in $$$ for the country to not be total shitshow like now. But billion here and there is real money. It's to be blunt, military base the size of US in JP or SKR money (1-4B). PRC currently not interested in that, because that's how you get nukes deployed in SKR and JP, and past history suggest that's how you start WW3. And lets be honest, if this ever happens, US is going to lean HARD on Canada shutdown tourists, and west aligned bloc going to actually come aboard US sanction train.

wcfields• 2 years ago

As an American that went to Cuba for tourism during the Obama years, let me say, once you go to Cuba once you’ll decidedly go somewhere else after.

FerretFred• 2 years ago

Would it be possible for Cuba to join the United Nations? That might provide some benefit.

Andrew_nenakhov• 2 years ago

I always thought that Ayn Rand was exaggerating when she prophesied that socialism will eventually result in total blackouts.

Hope Cubans will some day be free people again.

frenchman_in_ny• 2 years ago

Hopefully there will be some sort of study released relating to the restart of the grid. From memory of the 2003 East Coast Blackout the restart mechanics are fairly complex.

Cuba's grid goes offline with blackout after a major power plant fails

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