Havana, Dec. — With small advances, the energy transition proposes a design strategy to support the national economy, food production, and other priority areas to face current challenges, announced Vicente de la O Levy, Cuban Minister of Energy and Mines, this Thursday.
Before the Sixth Ordinary Period of Sessions of the National Assembly of People's Power of Cuba, in its Tenth Legislature, the head of the sector informed the plenary about the progress of the program to recover generation capacity and alleviate the main tensions of the energy situation.
De la O Levy stated that in the national context it is necessary to prioritize export centers and food production centers in order to support economic stabilization, which is essential to generate useful income for financing the investments needed to rescue the electrical infrastructure.
He clarified that although the decision will affect other sectors of society, it is necessary to take this step to achieve better conditions for service performance, where significant daily disruptions accumulate, which would have been greater without the actions taken so far.
These measures, he detailed, focus mainly on recovering own capacities, distributed generation, and the installation of photovoltaic solar parks, among other tasks.
Regarding the passage of Hurricane Melissa through the eastern region last October, he considered that although the damages were significant, in the energy sector the experiences acquired from previous contingency events were leveraged to ensure, with electric generator groups, the vital centers for the economy and services, and the creation of generation islands to energize the territory in the shortest possible time.
He added that an important part of this transition lies in efforts to stop the decline in extraction from national wells and the production of domestic hydrocarbons to supply the thermoelectric plants.
However, he specified that unexpected failures occurred after maintenance and investment processes in the main generation units that made it impossible to meet the goal of recovering 1,400 megawatts.
In light of this, he emphasized that expanding the installation of photovoltaic solar parks appears as an alternative that allows reducing deficits outside peak hours and at specific times of the day, where this energy source managed to cover approximately 30 percent of the country's energy participation, although there are still territories that have not advanced at the desired speed.
He explained that to support these actions, more than one billion dollars have been allocated, financed by the country's own resources and prioritized for the recovery of the electrical system, which shows the Cuban State's will to address this matter progressively toward reducing blackout hours, which will not be immediately visible but is underway.
Information from the Cuban News Agency (ACN)
