The two total disconnections that the national electricity system (SEN) has had, the first this Friday, October 18 at noon, and the second on the morning of Saturday the 19thhas broken down in another thermoelectric plant (CTE) in the country.
Now it was Unit 3 of the CTE ‘Carlos Manuel Céspedes’, based in Cienfuegos, which went out of circulation due to overload and failure caused by the variability in flow.
The general director of the Cienfuegos Thermoelectric Company, José Osvaldo González Rodríguez, blamed the failure of “the stability of the system,” which collapsed in its entirety on Friday, leaving the entire country without electricity.
“When the system crashes, our unit, which has been synchronized, suddenly loses its operational limits and is left working against the national electricity system. This is what is often said: the system crushes the unit,” explained the manager.
So the plant showed failures in one of their turbines, which caused the entire plant to be disconnected, which will not be back to work, at least, “until Monday afternoon,” according to the official.
It seems that the various generating plants on the Island are falling into a kind of “domino effect”, unable to support the additional burden of work for all the plants that are out of service
This is what made the CTE ‘Antonio Guiteras’ go out of service, in Matanzas, the most important in Cuba and and as a result of its simultaneous interruption the entire electrical system of the country went down. Before the failure of Guiteras, more than 60 generating plants and distribution plants in the country were already out of service.
According to González Rodríguez, Cienfuegos CTE operators are preparing so that, when the cooling phase ends, which lasts 100 hours, a complete inspection can be carried out and the plant can be reconnected as soon as possible.
“Preparatory activities will be carried out so that, when that time arrives, we can immediately begin to find out bearings and gain access to the places we need to explore,” he said. .
Although the explanation was a little confusing, what is clear is that work will begin until Monday to even identify the damage to the CTE, and later we can talk about a date for its repair.
At this time it is not known what effect the abandonment of this plant may have on SEN, just when It is planned to re-establish the service in Cuba – which is now at 50% –since the closure of this plant on October 14 was one of the main factors for overloading the entire system.
At that time, the UNE said that the center’s disconnection was “scheduled,” despite the fact that it had been notified when it had already been out of action for more than 15 hours.
