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The Asian Development Bank (ADB) on Sunday said it will back USD 70 billion in new energy and digital infrastructure initiatives across Asia and the Pacific by 2035, aimed at strengthening cross-border connectivity and expanding access to electricity and broadband. Energy and digital access will play a defining role in shaping the region's future, adding that the initiatives seek to link power grids and digital networks to lower costs and expand opportunities, ADB President Masato Kanda said while speaking to the media at the 59th annual meeting of the bank here. The bank announced two major programmes -- the Pan-Asia Power Grid Initiative and the Asia-Pacific Digital Highway -- with proposed investments of USD 50 billion and USD 20 billion, respectively. "These two initiatives build the systems Asia and the Pacific need to grow, compete, and connect. By linking power grids and digital networks across borders, we can lower costs, expand opportunity, and bring reliable power and ...
Cuba's power grid collapsed Saturday leaving the country without electricity for a third time in March as the communist government battles with a decaying infrastructure and a US-imposed oil blockade. The Cuban Electric Union, which reports to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, announced a total blackout across the island without initially giving a cause for the outage. The union later said the blackout was caused by an unexpected failure of a generating unit at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camaguey province. "From that moment, a cascading effect occurred in the machines that were online," said a report from the Ministry of Energy and Mines, which activated "micro-islands" of generating units to provide power to vital centres, hospitals and water systems. Authorities said they were working to restore power. Power outages, whether nationwide or regional, have become relatively common in the last two years due to breakdowns in the aging infrastructure. The breakdowns are ...