Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Cuban Electrical Grid Fails, Hurricane Approaches
The Cuban electrical grid failed on Firday, and the government has struggled to get it up and running again. Indeed, they have seen the grid collapse four times in as many days. As of this morning, Havana was about half restored, while the rest of the country did not have enough power to report on the situation with any accuracy. Not even the government of Texas is this inept (but it is close). A tropical island that is not run on solar, wind and tidal is the result of poor policy. The Cuban government has, yet again, failed the people for whom it allegedly fought the revolution (long enough ago that the revolution qualifies for a pension). Marxism always ends like this, in failure and suffering due to bad planning and poor execution.
The Associated Press said, "The failure of the Antonio Guiteras plant on Friday, which caused the collapse of the island's whole system, was just the latest in a series of problems with energy distribution in a country where electricity has been restricted and rotated to different regions at different times of the day. The status of Cuba's other power plants was unclear . . . .
"Cuba's government had said Saturday that some electricity had been restored. But the 500 megawatts of energy in the island's electricity grid, far short of the usual 3 gigawatts it needs, had quickly decreased to 370 megawatts."
The defenders of the allegedly communist regime will blame it all on Yankee imperialism. Cuba has benefited from cheap oil from Russia and Venezuela, and it has deliberately chosen to under-invest in renewable energy. Indeed, the island has fairly good relations with China, which produces 80% of the solar panels in the world. It is hard to defend the failure of the Havana government to get those panels to its people.
The Marxists suffer from the bigger is better attitude that harkens back to the Bolshevik coup in Russia. In their desire to prove their system is superior to any other in existence, the Marxists build the biggest and try to produce the most of anything. Distributed power, that is, power consumed where it is generated, is more efficient and resilient. Yet, they insist on a centralized system. The reason is simple; one cannot control a decentralized system. It takes too much effort and man hours.
The English language website of El Pais, the newspaper from Madrid, wrote, "In 2022, the last year for which the International Energy Agency (IEA), the energy arm of the OECD, has data, more than 83% of electricity was generated using petroleum derivatives, mainly the imported fossil fuels. Natural gas plants contributed another 12%. And renewables -- biofuels; wind, with a few wind farms in the ‘experimental’ phase; hydro, with some 30 plants connected to the national grid; and solar -- account for less than 5%. This minimal contribution from renewables accounts for much of the generation problems suffered in recent years."
The paper also said, "Last March, the Cuban authorities announced a plan to install 92 solar parks by 2028. They said this would increase the island's generation capacity by around two gigawatts, raising the green energy contribution to almost 25% of the national electricity consumption by the end of the decade."
That is, once again, bigger is better. The parks will still require wires to send the power to the consumer. If the panels were on the roofs of the houses and offices and apartment buildings, the system would be more resilient and efficient.
That will not prevent hurricanes, like the one battering the eastern end of the island, from wrecking the power system. It will, however, make it easier and cheaper to restore things when the storms pass. That, however, will require leaders who put the people first. Marxists are never good at that.
@copy; Copyright 2024 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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