Welcome to today’s GridBrief. The collapse of Cuba's national grid this week leaves over 10 million people in darkness, exposing the fragility of its energy infrastructure and offering a warning to others. Today’s special issue breaks down the crisis, its causes, and the sobering parallels to challenges closer to home.

^{The Overview: What Happened}

In the early hours of December 4, Cuba’s largest power plant, the Antonio Guiteras facility, failed, triggering a catastrophic collapse of the national grid. Reports indicate near-total blackouts across the island, with only select government buildings and hotels in Havana maintaining power.

This is not the first such event: months of recurring outages, dwindling oil supplies, and natural disasters have brought the grid to its knees. Now, the government has suspended work and schools, struggling to restore power to a nation already crippled by economic and humanitarian crises.

The Causes: A Recipe for Disaster

Cuba’s electrical grid is a throwback to mid-20th-century Soviet engineering, designed for a world that no longer exists. Its backbone consists of aging, oil-fired power plants that were never built for efficiency or resilience. These plants burn heavy fuel oil, a byproduct of crude refining, which is both dirty and expensive. Unlike modern power systems that rely on diverse and renewable sources, Cuba’s grid is tethered to a precarious supply chain of imported oil—mainly from Venezuela, Russia, and Mexico. With these imports dwindling due to geopolitics and economic strain, the grid has been left starving for fuel.

What Powers the Grid?

• Oil-Fired Plants: These antiquated facilities, like the Antonio Guiteras plant, form the majority of Cuba’s power generation. Built decades ago, they’re prone to breakdowns and operate at low efficiency compared to modern combined-cycle plants.

• Aging Transmission Lines: Much of Cuba’s transmission infrastructure dates back to the Soviet era, meaning frequent line losses (electricity wasted as heat) and a high risk of failure during storms.

• Centralized Design: Most of the power comes from a handful of large plants. This creates a single-point-of-failure problem: when one plant like Guiteras fails, the entire grid can collapse.

• Limited Renewables: Despite its abundant sunshine and potential for wind energy, Cuba has made minimal progress in adopting renewables, further entrenching its dependence on fossil fuels.

Comparison to First-World Grids

In contrast, grids in developed nations have evolved into highly interconnected, technology-driven systems that prioritize resilience, efficiency, and sustainability. Here’s how Cuba’s grid stacks up:

1. Diversity of Energy Sources:

   • Developed Nations: Countries like Germany and the U.S. integrate coal, natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind, and hydropower. The diversification mitigates risk and ensures energy availability.

   • Cuba: Heavily reliant on oil, with minimal renewable energy penetration.

2. Modern Grid Technology:

   • Developed Nations: Utilize "smart grids" with real-time monitoring, demand-response systems, and advanced automation. These features prevent outages and quickly restore service after failures.

   • Cuba: Analog systems and minimal investment in technology upgrades mean outages are harder to predict and repair.

3. Transmission Infrastructure:

   • Developed Nations: Use high-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines to efficiently transmit electricity over long distances with minimal loss.

   • Cuba: Relies on aging, inefficient AC transmission systems prone to line loss and failure under stress.

4. Backup Systems:

   • Developed Nations: Microgrids, battery storage, and decentralized generation provide localized backup during crises.

   • Cuba: No meaningful backup infrastructure; the entire grid depends on centralized production.

The Soviet Legacy

Cuba’s grid was designed for a command economy where inefficiencies were masked by subsidies and centralized control. It wasn’t built to adapt to modern energy demands, and it lacks the investment and innovation needed for 21st-century reliability. Instead of reforming the system, the Cuban government has doubled down on ideology, prioritizing centralized control over modernization and diversification.

The result? A grid perpetually teetering on the edge of collapse, incapable of weathering the economic and environmental challenges of today’s world. Where developed countries invest in redundancy, Cuba has maintained a brittle, outdated model—one that prioritizes cost-cutting over resilience and fails to meet the basic needs of its population.

The Analogy: Lessons for the U.S. Grid

Cuba’s energy disaster serves as a stark warning to the U.S., particularly for municipal utilities and public power systems that face similar vulnerabilities. Many American municipal grids—often touted as solutions for affordable and sustainable energy—operate on aging infrastructure with limited budgets for upgrades. These systems are not immune to mismanagement or the consequences of deferred maintenance.

Take Winter Park, Florida, as an example. After municipalizing its electric utility in 2003, the city struggled for years with outages and soaring operational costs, driven by the unexpected complexities of running a power grid. Similarly, New York’s Long Island Power Authority (LIPA), though not technically a municipal utility, has faced persistent criticism for its lack of preparedness during hurricanes and storm-related grid failures.

In California, local utilities like the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) are grappling with skyrocketing costs to transition to greener energy, often under pressure from ideological mandates rather than realistic timelines. This mirrors Cuba’s centralized focus on state-driven energy policy, which sacrifices resilience for political objectives.

Public utilities’ inherent weaknesses—limited economies of scale, political interference, and bureaucratic inefficiency—can lead to systemic fragility. Like Cuba, some U.S. municipalities prioritize short-term political wins over critical investments in grid modernization. Without private-sector incentives or competition, the systems risk stagnation, leaving them exposed to natural disasters, cyberattacks, or even moderate increases in demand.

Cuba’s collapse is a reminder: ideology cannot generate electricity, and political promises do little to keep the lights on when infrastructure fails. The U.S. must heed these lessons and approach municipal utility governance with caution, ensuring that decisions prioritize engineering soundness and financial sustainability over fleeting political trends.

The Outlook: How Will Cuba Recover?

Restoring power will require days, if not weeks, as crews struggle to restart the grid from scratch. Long-term recovery, however, is an entirely different beast. Without significant foreign aid or sweeping policy changes, Cuba will likely limp from one blackout to another.

Fixing the system would demand billions in investment, diversification of energy sources, and structural reforms—none of which appear likely under the current regime. For now, the Cuban people are left with candles, flashlights, and a deepening sense of frustration.

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