Cubans turn to solar panels as power outages deepen across island

In a Havana electronics store, Camilo Merejon is doing the math of Cuba’s power crisis one panel, one battery, and one fan at a time. The taxi driver is staring at photovoltaic systems and lithium batteries that could make the blackouts more bearable, but the price tags put that comfort far beyond what many families can pay. In today’s Cuba, the question is no longer whether the lights will go out. It is who can afford a workaround when they do.

Solar has become a private emergency plan

Merejon’s calculations are painfully specific. A three-kilowatt solar system costs thousands of dollars, and larger setups can run past $10,000, turning what looks like a practical fix into a luxury purchase. He says a modest system could cover his basic needs, but only if help arrives from friends abroad, which is now one of the clearest dividing lines in the island’s energy economy.

That divide is visible in the store itself, where customers are comparing solar panels, lithium batteries, and solar-powered fans against wages that do not stretch to imported hardware. The island’s power crisis has made resilience a market, and that market is increasingly split between those with access to foreign cash, credit, or family support and those with none of it.

What a blackout day looks like in Regla

By the time Merejon is shopping, his neighborhood of Regla has already been out for 26 hours. That kind of outage has become part of daily planning across Cuba since the start of 2026, when the island slid deeper into one of its worst energy crises in recent years. The immediate effect is obvious: no reliable schedule for cooking, charging phones, or keeping food from spoiling. The larger effect is economic, because every hour without power forces people to spend again, whether on batteries, fuel, charcoal, or replacement appliances.

Charcoal is back in the picture too, not as a nostalgic cooking option but as a stopgap for people pushed out of the solar market. Battery-based workarounds fill some gaps, but they only last as long as the charge, and recharging depends on the same fragile grid that failed in the first place.

Small businesses are moving first

The rooftop rush is not only happening in homes. Small businesses are among the quickest to bolt solar panels onto their buildings because they cannot afford to shut down every time the grid wobbles. On Havana’s Malecón, one restaurant owner is installing panels as a practical response to an unreliable system.

Restaurants, repair shops, and other private operators are forced to choose between investing in equipment now or losing revenue every time the grid collapses later.

A grid under strain, not a passing glitch

The broader backdrop is not a short-term fuel squeeze alone. Cuba’s electricity system has been under pressure for years, and in February 2025 the country inaugurated the first of 92 planned solar parks in a Chinese-backed push to ease the blackouts. The Havana site was one of 55 expected to come online in 2025, with the rest planned by 2028, and the project is meant to add about 2,000 megawatts to the grid.

The scale of the shortage is stark. Cuba’s maximum electricity demand is around 3,500 megawatts, but the system regularly fails to meet as much as 1,500 megawatts of that demand. Less than 5% of Cuba’s energy came from alternative sources, while the government’s goal is 24% renewable electricity by 2030.

The blackouts themselves have kept coming. Major grid collapses hit in March 2025 and again in March 2026, and another nationwide outage in 2024 fed directly into the same energy breakdown that helped fuel the July 2021 protests.

Why fuel scarcity keeps pushing the crisis deeper

Fuel shortages are making the outage cycle harder to break. In March 2026, a power outage struck most of Cuba amid increased pressure from the Trump administration that curtailed oil shipments. The island had gone more than three months without oil shipments and was keeping the system alive with solar power, natural gas, and thermoelectric plants.

When oil supply narrows, the grid leans harder on whatever generation it can still muster, and households feel the squeeze immediately. It also helps drive demand for equipment that lets people bypass the state system entirely, from rooftop panels to batteries to electric tricycles and other stopgaps.

Policy is pushing the private sector toward solar

The state is also nudging, and in some cases forcing, bigger energy users toward renewables. A late-2024 decree requires high-energy consumers, including state and private entities, to invest in renewable energy sources. The decree defines those users as entities averaging 30,000 kilowatts or 50,000 liters of fuel consumption over the previous 12 months, and they have three years to meet daytime consumption requirements through those investments.

That policy helps explain why solar is showing up on private businesses as much as on family rooftops. The practical result is a new kind of unevenness: the businesses and households with money or outside help can build their own mini-grids, while everyone else stays tied to the same failing supply.