CTE Felton
Thermoelectric plant in Holguín, eastern Cuba; Unit 2 offline during the 15 April 2026 peak deficit.
A 110kV Havana substation fault tripped Felton on 2 August, triggering Cuba's sixth total grid collapse of 2026, UNE said; other reporting cited storm damage on a transmission line instead, and the two accounts remain unreconciled.
Last refreshed: 4 August 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
Why do so many Cuban power stations fail at the same time?
Timeline for CTE Felton
Tripped when the frequency oscillation reached Holguín
Cuba Dispatch: UNE blames a 110kV fault, not a stormMentioned in: Guiteras stops a 20th time, 64.6% dark
Cuba DispatchHosted the unit 1 trip that collapsed the grid
Cuba Dispatch: Felton trips, and the grid falls againMentioned in: Nuevitas failure blacks out all Cuba
Cuba DispatchUNE forecasts 1,732 MW blackout at evening peak
Cuba DispatchBackground
CTE Felton is a heavy-fuel-oil thermoelectric plant in Holguin province, eastern Cuba, one of the ageing Soviet-era units that supply the island's eastern grid. Holguin has recorded some of Cuba's longest daily blackouts through 2025 and 2026, a pattern residents link directly to Felton's unreliability, with regular outages exceeding sixteen hours.
The plant sits within Cuba's wider thermoelectric fleet, all of it decades old, starved of spare parts and dependent on fuel imports squeezed by US Executive Order 14380, in force since January 2026 . Felton's two units have each gone offline within the same reporting quarter, contributing directly to multiple national grid collapses across 2026 .
In Havana's telling, each Felton outage becomes evidence for the government's case that the blackouts stem from sanctions rather than mismanagement. Felton's repeated failures track the wider fleet's decline: what happens at this one plant reflects the condition of Cuba's thermoelectric system as a whole.
Felton tripped in Cuba's sixth collapse
Cuba's National Grid collapsed completely on 2 August, the sixth total blackout of 2026, a day after a partial outage had already hit five provinces; a reconnection attempt then failed on 3 August. UNE, the grid operator, pointed to a 110kV fault at a Havana substation that tripped Felton, in Holguin province, rather than the storm damage on a transmission line cited elsewhere; the two accounts have not been reconciled .
The fault landed on a fleet with almost no spare capacity Left. A week earlier, on 26 July, Cuba's largest plant, Antonio Guiteras, had broken down for the 20th time in 2026, leaving UNE forecasting just 1,150 MW against demand of 3,250 MW and seven further thermal units already offline, Felton's own units among the ageing cohort exposed to the same fuel and maintenance pressures .
Fuel sanctions left Felton undersupplied
On 15 April 2026 Cuba's grid operator UNE forecast it could meet only 43 per cent of evening peak demand, with four major generating units, Felton's among them, sitting offline simultaneously against a projected need of 3,000 MW . The shortfall traces to fuel imports squeezed by US Executive Order 14380, in force since January 2026, which starves an already decades-old fleet of the heavy fuel oil plants like Felton depend on.
Felton was still compromised when Cuba's National Grid collapsed completely on 6 July, after Nuevitas' Unit 6 failed elsewhere in the fleet and restoration took three days, leaving Matanzas dark for up to 87 hours . Each fix now buys the fleet, Felton included, only months before the next collapse.
Felton's own trip collapsed the grid
Felton's Unit 1 tripped at 11:05 on 14 July, collapsing Cuba's National Grid for the second time in a week and widening the generation deficit to 2,020 MW . The grid had no reserve margin Left after a 10 July collapse, when 11 of 16 thermal units nationwide were already offline.
Both of Felton's two units failed within three months of each other, faster than the deferred-maintenance cycle affecting Cuba's wider thermoelectric fleet, and Cuba's grid operator confirmed the national deficit was still climbing afterward, to a 2,240 MW forecast. For a week, a single plant's reliability record had become the pivot on which the whole island's power supply turned.