Villa Clara entrepreneur opens solar station to ease blackouts, charge vehicles

A small solar station in Santa Clara has become a lifeline for nearby families, turning blackout hours into something more manageable. The first community-use solinera in Villa Clara opened on April 4 in the Virginia popular council, with residents able to cook food, charge phones and even power small electric vehicles without depending on the national grid.

The station was built by Proyecto de Desarrollo Local PDL Gomate and runs completely outside Cuba’s Sistema Electroenergético Nacional. Its creator, Julio Ernesto Gomate Morales, 29, said the team assembled the installation from scratch on bare ground in just nine days. The site can serve six vehicles at once and has 26 double outlets for 52 cooking devices, along with spaces for charging motorbikes, tricycles, lamps and other battery-powered equipment.

For families living through repeated outages, the most immediate benefit is practical survival. Cooking services at the station are free, making it a rare place where a meal can be prepared without worrying about the grid or fuel. Vehicle charging is expected to carry a low fee later, part of an effort to keep the project financially sustainable while still serving the neighborhood.

Local officials in Virginia described the station as a way to confront prolonged blackouts that have become routine since at least the summer of 2024. They called it a community-strength project, one that gives the block a place to keep moving when the lights go out. A local renewable-energy builder described the work as unprecedented and said it forced the team to innovate.

The numbers behind the project help explain why it has drawn attention. PDL Gomate said the solinera installed 30 kilowatts and had another 50 kilowatts available for services. It operates from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., giving neighbors a reliable daytime stop for basic energy needs while the broader system struggles.

Villa Clara has been pushing solar power hard. By Feb. 16, the province had 125.2 megawatts of installed photovoltaic capacity across 11 sites, with a target of nearly 190 megawatts. Nationally, Cuba reached 1,000 megawatts of solar generation in 2025, a level authorities said covered about 38% of daytime electricity consumption at those moments.

That push comes against the backdrop of a deeper crisis. On Oct. 18, 2024, Cuba’s national grid collapsed, leaving the island’s 10 million people without electricity after aging power plants, fuel shortages and reduced imports strained a system already close to breaking. In that setting, the Santa Clara solinera looks less like a novelty than a test case: a neighborhood-sized answer to a national failure, and a model other blocks may try to copy.