The Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel visited the “Antonio Guiteras” Thermoelectric Central of Matanzas, the main current generating block in the country, which is at the gates of undergoing a capital reparation of six months after years of continuous exploitation and only punctual remains due to the most diverse breaks.
Accompanied by Vicente de la O Levy, Minister of Energy and Mines, and Alfredo López, General Director of the Electric Union (UNE), the president He gathered With specialists from the center, whom he indicated to prepare capital maintenance well and quality, which he considered unplazable.
While that moment comes we will continue to recover capabilities to lessen the impact of the exit, said Díaz-Canel on the meeting, which occurs in the middle of one of the crisis deeper of the electricity generation in Cuba.
On that idea insisted Rubén Campos, director of the Guiteras, who said that at the moment the unit provides 226 megawatts (MW) to the national electrical system (SEN), limited in its power by one of the feeding pumps and a high water consumption.
According to a presidency note, Campos explained that the priorities of Guiteras are now “maintaining the generation with the greatest possible reliability and efficiency until capital reparation”; as well as preparing and executing that important process that still does not have an exact start date, although it must be in December.
Maintenance work, which must be extended for a period of 180 days, will include deep tasks in the boiler, which must improve their functioning in the future and contribute to the central increasing its power to 315 MW. However, the UNE managers have clarified that there will not be a new boiler, since all its elements will be replaced.
Among the planned works is also the complete change of the reheating – structure with 15 kilometers of pipe – as well as an important part of the regenerative heaters, the air and gase ducts, the burners and the pumps of the economizer.
In addition, a chemical to the boiler will be carried out “to protect its future operation once the work is completed,” said Alfredo López, director of the UNE, in a recent intervention in the Table Round TV show.
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You must also work in the turbine – including its cylinders, valves and chumaceras -, change auxiliary equipment, incorporate high pressure heaters and finish the assembly of filtering systems and the “change of circulation seawater ducts”, which are used to cool the steam that comes out of the turbine.
Guiteras has not received a depth general maintenance for more than 15 years, although this period has undergone some scheduled repairs. In the particular case of the boiler, it has not received capital maintenance since the plant was inaugurated in 1988, according to explained Last July, the journalist José Miguel Solís, who usually informs about the work in the Matanzas thermoelectric plant.
