I was coming home from Ponce Wednesday and decided that rather than take the expressway as I normally so, I would drive up and around the coast.

I drove through Guayama and drove up close to the AES coal plant. There was some steam venting but, looking closely at the heat plume, or rather the lack of a plume, it appeared that the plant might have been offline.

I also drove close to the Aguirre plant. Again, a bit of steam venting but not much of a heat plume.

In Yabucoa, at least 2 of the 3 gas turbines were running and, from the plumes, running fairly hard. Ditto the 2 GTs in Ceiba.

Santa Isabel Windfarm

Thursday I drove past the Santa Isabel windfarm. As you can see from the flag, it seemed fairly windy. As you can see from the windmills, only 3 of the 30 or so were actually turning. I have no idea why. 

In a letter to the PR Energy Commission last year, the owners of the windmills said that there was no apparent storm damage but they could not be operated for two reasons:

1) The transmission lines were still down so they had no way to get the power into the grid. That seemed reasonable in October, not so reasonable today. 

2) The other reason, which took me aback, was that they cannot operate the windmills unless they can receive utility power to energize their generators. I can understand needing some power to energize controls, get the windmill pointed in the right direction and energize the generator coils. That would not seem like a lot of power and a relatively small diesel generator should be able to supply it.

One more reason the whole idea of using wind to generate utility scale electricity seems harder and harder for me to understand.