Faced with Cuba’s severe fuel crisis, which intensified after the United States imposed a de facto oil blockade in January of this year, taxi drivers are abandoning their cars and transporting passengers in electric tricycles. But recharging their batteries in a country with blackouts of 20 hours or more is an outright odyssey.
Until a 21-year-old and his family hit upon a solution as obvious as it is effective: install solar panels on the trikes.
Solar panels to ease the blackouts and keep moving
Gerard Pablo Espinosa, a 21-year-old, runs a small artisanal workshop with his family on the outskirts of Havana and has already transformed more than 15 electric tricycles into solar-powered vehicles capable of drawing energy from the sun as they ride through the island’s streets. The logic is simple yet brilliant: the panel mounted on the roof supplies power directly to the motor while in motion, and when the vehicle stops, that same energy goes to recharge the battery.
The solar panel is installed on the tricycle’s roof, secured with a handcrafted iron frame that also acts as a canopy. It thus shields the driver, and their passengers or goods, from sun and rain while also producing energy.
During the five hours of peak radiation, the panels on a tricycle can contribute up to about 2,600 W, Yadán explains to EFE’s cameras, a figure that is not enough to fully power the motor, but it is enough to steadily ease the battery’s load and thus noticeably extend the trikes’ range.
The context that makes this possible and urgent this invention is far from simple. Cuba, which had already been dealing with years of fuel shortages, has reached a point bordering on collapse after the United States President Donald Trump took measures to choke the communist country by cutting off the oil supply.
Cuba needs more than 110,000 barrels of oil per day and locally produces less than 40,000. More than 80% of Cuba’s electricity generation comes from thermal plants and fossil-fuel-powered sources. Cuban crude is very heavy and cannot be refined into gasoline or diesel. Practically all the fuel required must be imported, as does the fuel needed for the generator sets.
The problem is that Venezuela suspended shipments of between 27,000 and 30,000 barrels per day after Nicolás Maduro’s capture on January 3, and Mexico cut its exports to the island, which accounted for 44% of Cuban imports, on January 9.
The result is an energy agony, with power cuts that exceed 20 hours a day in many areas, public transport nearly paralyzed, and gasoline at more than six dollars per liter. In Ciego de Ávila, for example, in the island’s center, only 2 of the 135 bus lines are operating due to fuel shortages.
¿La solución con la que dieron los ciudadanos? Recuperar los triciclos eléctricos que invadieron la isla tras el colapso de la Unión Soviética y el fin de las ayudas y el suministro de energía de la URSS en los años 90. Ahora, vuelven a proliferar como alternativa al taxi tradicional.
En Cuba, los triciclos eléctricos se han convertido en un medio de vida para miles de personas que transportan mercancías, alimentos y pasajeros en ciudades con un transporte público deficiente y donde la gasolina es un lujo. La falta de autonomía en las baterías y la dificultad para recargar obligaba a muchos conductores a acortar su jornada laboral o a rechazar viajes largos, lo que afectaba directamente a los ingresos que sostienen a sus familias.
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