Most of PR without electricity

Gary thanks for keeping us up to date, I tried to find updates an hour ago but most of what I found was rehashed news with the same numbers as yesterday.

My pleasure

There's a high probability that the blackout was caused by a lighting strike according to Angel Crespo, the chief of of the PR firefighters:  http://www.elnuevodia.com/english/engli … t-2244424/

I am wondering  why one lightning strike (or whatever may have caused the beginning of the problems) can put the grid down on all of the island.
O.K. I may be spoiled having lived in the two countries with the least blackouts world wide (The Netherlands and Germany) but come on, there should be at least some redundancy built in the system, right? If a single lightning strike can put down the grid on the island something is structural wrong with the design of the system.

Now, please don't think I'm surprised. I've lived here for 15 years now and I know that a little wind or some heavy rain will cause power outages all over the place. I hope that this "apagón" (huge blackout) will lead to measures to improve the system but somehow I have a feeling that everything will stay like it was...

Yea they are sugesting plans that will modernize the whole thing in about 20 years. I think we need it sooner than that. Also they need to get out of burning fuel and they dont seem to be in a rush to do that either.

Was it not that someplace around Aguadilla they wanted to reopen a garbage burning electric plant that the people were protesting about? Who knows what is in that garbage that they wanted to burn.

Privatize the power company, get rid of current management and make the new owner (by law) financially compensate customers for blackouts.
That would also end the stuation where government agencies and municipalities are not paying for electricity.

Then (finally) start using solar power. If one place is predestined for that it's our island...

Of course there's the problem of the 9 billion debt that the power company built up, no clue how to deal with that other than rsising our our already ridiculously high energy bills.

It's a mess...

They could just turn the whole thing over for the 9 billion and contractually hold then to a standard.
Goverment or private,  either way it is a monopoly and the people will get the shaft. We are looking at rates like the ones in Hawaii.

Here are the rates thru 2011 for Hawaii. http://sunetric.com/blog/post/hawaii-el … the-years/

The latest numbers are horrible for Hawaii, it goes by island in Hawaii, the rates for residential are between 37.06 to 47.6 cents per kilowatt hour.
How you like to pay 47.06 cents per kWh?

Does anyone have any knowledge of what the 50 or so of windmills in Santa Isabel do? I can see them from my farm.

Yep,  what a waste. Maybe it's not the right timing.  I'm going to put the move off for a few months. At least airbnb refunded me. That plane ticket back though. ... sheesh!

Mrkpytn wrote:

Does anyone have any knowledge of what the 50 or so of windmills in Santa Isabel do? I can see them from my farm.

44 windmills projected to produce roughly 100 megawatts.  Can't find any performance figures for them however, after four years of operation.  Windmills are notoriously inefficient, expensive to maintain and frequently harmful to the environment.  Not only do they kill birds, the bearings frequently seize.