Solar, wind energy a missed opportunity for Cuba

Posted on Thursday, 07.05.12

Solar, wind energy a missed opportunity for Cuba
By ANDREA RODRIGUEZ
Associated Press

RAMON GORDO, Cuba -- The sleepy country setting that farmer Juan Alonso
calls home hasn't changed much since he was born 74 years ago, with the
two rustic wooden houses nestled among palm trees against a backdrop of
green hills and clear skies.

Incongruously perched atop the homes are the only visual clues that his
150-acre (60-hectare) farm inhabits the 21st century: the gleaming solar
panels that revolutionized the lives of Alonso and his family.

"Just imagine, you toil all day in the field and then when you get home
you have to grope around doing things with a gas lantern, with a torch
to illuminate the patio at night," Alonso said, describing life during
decades past. Now his family has electric lights, a television and a DVD
player. "It's a change as radical as night to day."

Cuba is proud of its success in using alternative energy to bring
electricity to isolated hamlets like Ramon Gordo, 90 miles (150
kilometers) west of Havana. Some 2,000 schools and at least 400
hospitals are lit up by solar panels in rural areas not plugged into the
national grid. But scientists say the island, blessed with year-around
sunshine and sea breezes but plagued with chronic energy shortages,
could be doing much more on the national level, and that its communist
government is missing a golden opportunity to reduce its dependence on
subsidized oil from uber-ally Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez is
sick with cancer.

It is vital that Cuba expand its energy horizons "so it doesn't remain
at the mercy of political changes in the region that could affect it
adversely," said Judith Cherni, an alternative energy expert at the
Imperial College London Center for Environmental Policy.

The urgency to find alternative energy sources was driven home last
month when an exploratory offshore oil well drilled by Spanish company
Repsol turned out to be dry, a setback to Cuba's hopes for a big strike
that could be a boon for the limping economy, though exploration continues.

Despite recent essays by revolutionary hero Fidel Castro on impending
global catastrophe due to climate change, Cuba gets just 3.8 percent of
its electricity from renewables, a pittance even by regional standards
and far behind global leaders.

In the nearby Dominican Republic, where a 2007 law establishes tax
breaks for investment in alternative energy, renewables account for 14
percent of electrical generation. Germany, the gold standard for
high-tech green energy, gets 20 percent of its considerably larger
electrical consumption from renewables, mostly from wind.

The reality in Cuba today is that wind and solar energy sources are
almost exclusively for local consumption and there has been little
attempt to expand them to augment the national grid, which is powered
mostly by fossil fuels. Scientists say the country lacks the investment
and expertise for such a move.

Around the region, examples abound for Cuba to emulate. Central American
nations are using hydroelectric facilities to harness the power of
rivers. Caribbean islands are passing laws stimulating foreign
investment in renewables. Wind and solar farms are popping up where
viable. Faraway in Europe, and nearby in the United States, individuals
with solar panels can get paid for any extra energy they generate that
goes back into the grid.

"Possessing apt natural resources to generate energies is a tremendous
boon, but that alone is not enough to create energy," said Cherni.

Another obstacle to boosting renewable energy is a stubbornly fixed
mindset that equates development with oil.

Memories are still vivid here of the "Special Period" of the 1990s, when
the island's economy tanked with the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
ushering in years of hunger, prolonged blackouts and fuel shortages.
People thumbed rides to work on the back of bicycles as cars sat idle
and empty-tanked.

To cope, Cuba began installing its first solar panels, building small
hydroelectric plants, restoring old windmills and extracting gas from
animal waste.

But after Chavez's election in 1998 in oil-rich Venezuela, Cuba once
again embraced fossil fuels wholeheartedly with the appearance of a new
benefactor and ideological ally willing to help keep the lights on.
Today Caracas provides nearly half Cuba's petroleum needs, shipping
about 100,000 barrels of oil a day to the island on beneficial terms
while Cuba sends doctors and technical advisers to Venezuela.

"Cuba is a nation that is dependent on oil, yes, but in addition the
culture of its leaders and technicians, of its common citizens, is one
of fossil fuels," said Alejandro Montesinos, a renewable energy expert
at Cubasolar, the island's chief NGO for sustainable energy.

In Havana, the fear is that the oil spigot could be turned off if Chavez
is forced to leave office due to health problems or electoral defeat.
Cuba has pinned its hopes on offshore oil deposits in the Gulf of Mexico
that could hold between 5 billion and 9 billion barrels, but those have
yet to be quantified, an initial exploration well came up dry and
production is still years out in a best-case scenario.

"In the imagination of the people, there is this idea that oil is going
to appear in the Gulf of Mexico and this country's problems will be
solved," said Montesinos, who says that Cuba and its leaders must
embrace the idea that expensive investments in solar and wind will pay
off over the long run.

A push for green energy would also match well with the ecological
leanings of the Castro brothers. Current President Raul Castro said June
21 at a summit in Rio de Janeiro that there is an urgent need for "a
transcendental change" and a shift to sustainable development if the
planet is to be saved.

Cuba began an alternative energy program in the 1980s and ramped it up
the following decade. It has installed 9,000 solar panels and built four
experimental wind farms, according to Manuel Mendez, director of
renewable energy at the Ministry of Basic Industry. It also burns
biomass from sugarcane, currently the island's largest source of
renewable energy in Cuba, and officials plan an expansion.

Cuban authorities say that in recent months they have completed a study
of the best places to install wind generators and made plans to
inaugurate a wind farm on the island's north coast next year. Details
have not been released. Around the turn of the year a new solar farm
with a one-megawatt capacity should come online on the Island of Youth.

"What has been done is a little or a lot?" Mendez asked rhetorically
during a recent TV appearance. "The answer is that ... more is required."

He added that officials aim to boost renewable electrical production to
16.5 percent of demand by 2020.

Alonso, the farmer in Ramon Gordo, said solar energy transformed his
family's life and he believes in green energy's potential to work
similar miracles on a national level.

"The sun is what gives the world energy, and it can power industry,"
Alonso said. "I think we lack strength, but we're on our way."

Follow Andrea Rodriguez on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ARodriguezAP

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/05/v-fullstory/2882728/solar-wind-energy-a-missed-opportunity.html