ENERGY-CUBA: Looking Towards the Sun

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Sep 17 1996 (IPS) - Without turning its back on nuclear energy, Cuba is looking towards the sun and other sources of renewable energy to ease the energy crisis that has gripped the economy for the last six years.

Although blackouts are getting shorter and shorter, and industries that had been brought to a virtual standstill by the fuel shortage are picking up again, Cuba is still far from being able to afford the 13 million tonnes of oil it consumed in the late 1980s.

“Cuba is in a position to use renewable resources in developing sustainable energy,” said Vito Quevedo, the director of industry and energy at the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment.

At this time, the greatest potential seems to lie in sugar cane husks, which experts say would produce 15 times more energy than the entire agroindustrial production of sugar – Cuba’s main export – would need.

Efforts to reduce dependence on oil include 47 projects using local sources that have not yet been used – peat, asphaltite, bituminous rocks and sand, rice husks, forestry and wood waste products and the accompanying gas – and others that have had a limited use – sugar cane husks, manure, biogas and solar, thermic, wind and hydro- energy.

According to figures from the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Cubasolar, “national sources of energy, especially renewable ones, provide more than 30 percent of the energy consumed in the country, a proportion that could increase substantially.”

Eleven of the projects, ranging from the use of rice husks to the installation of a wind park in the eastern part of the country, were presented by the Cuban delegation at the World Solar Summit held this week in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Organised for the first time in 1993 by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the Solar Summit uses the sun as a symbol for all renewable energy sources.

Enrico Turrini, the vice-president of the NGO Eurosolar, said Cuba’s scientific and technical potential combined with its economic conditions could make the island a kind of link between developing and industrialised countries in solar energy.

Eurosolar and the Cuban Society for the Promotion of Renewable Energy Sources are sponsoring a project to provide 700 rural schools here with the technological infrastructure to use solar energy.

The economic and financial weekly ‘Opciones’ reported on Sep. 8 that a large part of the financing for the first school, located 35 kilometres from Havana, was supplied by the Turrini family, Eurosolar and the European School in Brussels.

“The route of the sun is the only way countries can free themselves, in terms of energy, from those who dominate the technological and fuel markets,” said Turrini, the president of the European Patent Office’s chamber of resources in physics.

But experts say the high costs and the need for an initial outlay of capital continues to be the biggest problem in starting up national programmes for the use of renewable energy sources.

Cuba sits on the Regional Solar Council for the Americas and the Caribbean, and has proposed the creation of a regional information-sharing network on renewable energy.

“If we have potential, a programme, and a major energy problem to resolve,” said Quevedo, “if we have specialists and research centres, then Cuba can offer the world an example of sustainable development.”