Cuba fails to restore electricity, suffers second nationwide blackout after grid collapse

BombOmOm@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 155 points –
miamiherald.com
18

We should have called them up after the first time and asked how we can help, but noo.

By not blockading them, presumably.

That definitely can't be why they don't have the things they need.

I believe they rely on oil from Venezuela.

Which if iirc got the same treatment as Iran for not falling in line lol.

So I guess you could technically say it was indirect sanctions.

I'm not saying we don't have a hand in that but Venezuela is having their own governmentak crisis ATM.

I'm sure we would have, if we didn't have an election going and the Cubans in Florida weren't actually drooling watching the misery like pornhub.

wp:Solar power by country

According to this, Cuba produces less than 2% the solar power as Chile.

Solar is very expensive upfront cost and requires upgraded infrastructure. Cuba is poor and their infrastructure is old as fuck.

The beauty of solar is one doesn't always need infrastructure: little more than a few panels, some batteries, and an inverter.

Cuba gets a hell of a lot of hurricanes. They probably have a hard time keeping a solar farm nailed down. Likely they have some of the same problems if they tried to do a lot of wind. Wave or tidal might not be a miserable choice, But that stuff's pretty expensive, and they're still going to have a lot of extreme weather to deal with.

It probably wouldn't hurt them to have a small nuclear reactor. It would have to be designed very carefully and have a lot of failsafes and redundancies as using diesel for emergency coolant backup is probably not a viable solution for them.

If some roofs can withstand hurricanes, so can some solar panels. Presumably some wind turbines can withstand hurricane-force winds.

This is so profoundly sad for a country that once had so much. My Cuban ex-pat family decry the communist government role here but I can never forgive the US for their inhumanity in tacitly letting this disaster unfold and others in the Caribbean, but what else is new.