Wind power in Cuba: La Herradura 1 wind farm advances

The bases for the installation of wind turbines of the most powerful wind farm complex in Cuba, began to be built in La Herradura, in the north of Las Tunas, where some components of the wind energy generation technology are already close to the site.

Workers of the Provincial Construction and Assembly Company, started work on two of the 34 bases to place the wind turbines of La Herradura-1 (LH-1), located on the coast of the municipality of Jesus Menéndez, which when fully enlisted generate 51 MW / h.
Simultaneously to this park, La Herradura-2 (LH-2) is working, which will have 14 less generators, but with greater power, so that together it will be able to deliver a similar amount of energy to the National Electric Power System.
Beginning to melt first base is said to be easy, however, it is a complex and far-reaching process; first the water had to be extracted from the holes -1,70 deep and a radius of 16 meters-, generated by the proximity of the water table, and now the steel is placed and then melted, for which a large amount of materials is required , explained the engineer Carlos Manuel Quesada Borges, director of the Provincial Construction and Assembly Company, exclusively to the Cuban News Agency.
The executive explained that this procedure will be done in each of the bases, for which 50 tons of rebar and four thousand bags of cement P-350 should be used, so that in the 34 platforms of LH-1 136 thousand will be used bags of that material.
Now we have new technology for the movement of land, but most of the work was done with the old equipment handled by men in charge of building the induced works, mainly roads to facilitate the entry and exit of special vehicles for the transfer, from Puerto Carúpano, of the components of the wind turbines, each of them has a length of almost 70 meters, meant.
We are also working on the movement of land for the construction of the electric substation that will transfer to the National Electric Power System, the energy generated by the LH-1 and LH-2 parks, which together can provide up to 100 MW / h. This would stop consuming about 75 thousand tons of fossil fuels in a year, with the consequent elimination of the atmosphere, of considerable volumes of CO2.
Quesada Borges reported that by taking advantage of the infrastructure created to install the wind turbines, a third park is planned in the area itself, in addition to one in the municipality of Manatí with foreign capital.
Cuba foresees until 2030 that 24 percent of electricity consumption comes from renewable energy, a program in which Las Tunas is emerging as the first province to depend less on fossil fuels, when the wind farms are activated and the contribution of the three photovoltaic solar parks in operation, fundamentally. This possibility is based on the fact that only LH-1 and LH-2 will be able to generate 101 MW / h, and the province’s current average electricity consumption is 112 MW / h.