Havana Solar Base Station Case

HAVANA TIMES – On February 21, 2025, the first solar photovoltaic park was inaugurated, with a capacity of 21.8 MW. The project, located in Cotorro—on the outskirts of Havana—is part of the island's government's bet on solar energy to address the country's dire electricity situation.

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel inaugurated the first of 92 solar parks on Friday as part of a Chinese-backed plan to ease hours-long blackouts across the Caribbean island nation.

The Cuban government's plan is to install 55 solar parks similar to the one in Cotorro by 2025. The total capacity will be 1,200 MW. These are part of a broader project running until 2028, which aims to build 92 parks, with the goal of adding more than 2,000 MW to the National Electro-Energy System.

By 2030, the country aims to generate more than a third of its electricity from solar parks and other renewable sources. Cuba on Friday unveiled a new solar energy park in the capital Havana, part of an ambitious project to alleviate the communist island's increasingly desperate struggle with power blackouts.

Cuba's large-scale blackouts that left 10 million people without power this month may not have happened if the government had built out more solar power to boost its failing electric grid as promised, some experts say.

In a nation with plentiful sunshine, Cuban officials have long had the opportunity to encourage solar power as one solution to national energy problems. But October's sweeping outages — the island's worst power failure in years — show little progress has been made.