Mastodawn

When I see this sort of headline, I pull up BloombergNEF's solar exports from China tool, and yeah, Cuba was the destination for $117 million (about 1.3GW) of Chinese solar panels in 2025. This is up from approximately nothing in 2023.

Cuba had 6.8GW of power capacity total at the end of 2024, none of which was solar, 5.4GW of which was oil and 0.9GW gas. Solar slides nicely into an oil-heavy grid, pushing out expensive consumption immediately.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-cuba-oil-supply-power-grid-blackout/

Jenny Chase Feb 17

1. We don't have to depend on the whims of fossil tyrants for our electricity any more.

2. dammit I need to add Cuba to my solar demand spreadsheet and then the rest of the Bloomberg data system.

dr2chase Feb 17

@solar_chase I've lately wished for a graph showing likely estimates of the cost of "solar panels and batteries to provide 24/7 power".
(e.g./simplifying, for 24/7 1kW from 8 hours daily sun, you need 3kW solar + 16kWH battery, costing X$ to install w/ service life of Y years). And then how many fusion/dinky-fission startup business plans does that kill?

Jenny Chase Feb 17

@dr2chase trouble is it's really not that simple. Most places are much too seasonal for that calculation to actually work; even India has the monsoon season where you wouldn't be able to charge.

Ironically one of the places of least seasonal insolation is Saudi Arabia. My colleague Abdullah Alkattan recently did some work on meeting baseload with solar + storage, and you can *almost* do it for $70/MWh.

dr2chase Feb 17

(I did say "simplifying"...) I was wondering about Cuba. My memory of growing up in FL is that day-after-day of overcast is rare. The only thing I can come up with for sustained clouds is an outrageous solar overprovision, with the usual surplus used for energy-intensive processes (fixing nitrogen, desalination, electrolytic metal refining) that can go offline for the 10% of the year that's overcast. If you do it instead with (say) gas turbines, those sit idle 90% of the year, that's costly.

Leon Overweel Feb 18

@dr2chase @solar_chase this sounds a lot like work Ember did last summer: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-every-hour-of-every-day-is-here-and-it-changes-everything/

Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything | Ember

Batteries are now cheap enough to unleash solar energy’s full potential, getting as close as 97% of the way to delivering constant electricity supply 24 hours across 365 days cost-effectively in the sunniest places.

Ember

Jenny Chase Feb 19

@leonoverweel @dr2chase yeah, I saw that report and while I don't think it is bad or wrong per se, it's a little misleading for somewhere like Birmingham where demand will peak in the winter as well.

Like, the 'baseload' assumption is okay for a thought experiment (we used it in Saudi Arabia because it's like a data center) but the actual best pathway to net zero electricity in Birmingham is a lot more wind-heavy, and if you pushed solar + storage to 62% you would force out wind.

Jenny Chase Feb 19

@leonoverweel @dr2chase I spend my life telling people to be a bit cautious about how to treat seasonality.

Batteries are really big! Bigger than I imagined! I was just walloped with news of really big (>3GW) solar and storage (mixed- co-located and standalone) plans in North Macedonia and the Philippines, being built this year. But still seasonality is going to mean that batteries cannibalize battery revenues sooner than imo some people realize.

Jenny Chase Feb 19

@leonoverweel @dr2chase humans are bad at thinking about costs that are a mixture of capex and opex. And when you have something that is high-capex (like batteries) the capacity factor becomes absolutely critical.

Then when you have hours of the year where demand and supply are very different, the economic maths goes nonlinear. I would like to say "...and here at BNEF we absolutely understand and model that" but, um, I think we have successfully nailed some specific cases and that's it.

dr2chase Feb 19

@solar_chase @leonoverweel the thing that bothers me is how much it costs to cover the overcast+windless tail risk. If average load is X, then 16X batteries gets you through a night, but if you have an entire day of no supply, that requires 40x batteries to keep the lights on, but 99% of the time those extra 24x batteries (adding 150% to capex) go unused. It *might* have some value to extend service life of battery array, but there's still upfront costs paid off slowly.

dr2chase Feb 19

@solar_chase @leonoverweel this is what makes me wonder about switchable/optional demand -- because over time most of our FF-powered industry (steel, concrete, nitrogen fixing, desalinization, LLM training) will need to shift to electricity. Some of those processes are easy to stop/start, some are not, it might make more economic sense to shut some demand down to cover 1%-occurrence supply glitches, than to overprovision supply/storage so much that it covers that glitch.

Jenny Chase Feb 19

.... North Macedonia, man. It's got 1.8 million people and under 3GW (edited) of total power generating capacity. And plans to build 3,014MW of PV projects, plus 2,207MW/4,961MWh of storage, afaict this year.

Maybe the solution for net zero is simply big cheap batteries after all.

(Two years ago I would have been sure this was fake / unserious / I was misreading).

https://energy.gov.mk/en-GB/odnosi-so-javnost/soopstenija/drzavata-voveduva-red-vo-energetikata-usvoen-godisniot-plan-za-izgradba-na-energetski-objekti-za-2026-godina

The state introduces order in the energy sector: Annual Plan for construction of energy facilities for 2026 adopted - Statements - Public relations - Ministry of Energy, Mining and Mineral Resources - Republic of North Macedonia

The state introduces order in the energy sector: Annual Plan for construction of energy facilities for 2026 adopted Statements Public relations Ministry of energy, mining and raw materials

Hendrik Weimer Feb 19

Solar panels + batteries beat the hell out of everything else. If you want to, you can simulate this yourself: https://sonnenwende.codeberg.page/

It's for Germany, but for a more southern country like North Macedonia, the situation is even more lopsided.

Sonnenwende

Jenny Chase Feb 19

@hweimer hmm this is cool and interesting but before I run this for hours and hours I'd like to know how it is calibrating the pricing. Mostly the power pricing for a solar-only system seems pretty high compared to realized solar prices on the German market, though the price of solar at 1.2 euros a W is really high too.

Abdullah Khalid Feb 21

@solar_chase @hweimer I played around with this. Seems interesting.

I would like some more stats to know how I am doing. A monthly/yearly history of

- how many units were generated by solar panels (perhaps relative to available sunlight)
- similar measures for batteries and others
- profits, perhaps broken by source (sold by solar panel, sold by battery, etc).

Georg Kury Feb 19

Thanks for posting the link!

The actual installed power is even less if you exclude energy imports (~40% of energy consumption):

10 MW Biomass
820 MW Coal
160 MW Oil
250 MW Gas
640 MW Water
40 MW Wind
70 MW Solar
1990 MW Total

That´s really crazy!

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/installed_power/chart.htm?l=de&c=MK

Energy-Charts

Die Energy-Charts bieten interaktive Grafiken zu: Stromproduktion, Stromerzeugung, Emissionen, Klimadaten, Spotmarktpreisen, Szenarien zur Energiewende und eine umfangreiche Kartenanwendung zu: Kraftwerken, Übertragungsleitungen und Meteodaten

Jenny Chase Feb 19

@c_ozwei hmm you're right, not sure where 10GW came from. Need to be more careful.

see shy jo Feb 17

@solar_chase According to this video, they are planning to install 10 GW. Video also mentions China is donating some of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDQtZn5uO-o

Ocho parques solares de 21,8 megawatts ya están sincronizados al Sistema Eléctrico Nacional

YouTube

Dan York Feb 17

@solar_chase Great data! Thank you for sharing that info!

@solar_chase solar is only part of the answer. Unless you can store it, solar cannot standalone. Cuba now needs so much support but is another nation being held to ransom and people are dying because of one nation's whims and insecurities.