Windmills, giants and the wind we don't use

“I am also the fiery life of the essence of divinity; I flame above the beauty of the fields, and I shine in the waters, and I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. With the airy wind I quicken all things with some invisible life that sustains them all.” — Hildegard of Bingen, Liber Divinorum Operum, Part I, Vision 1 (c. 1163–1174; trans. Nathaniel M. Campbell)

Hildegard wrote this in a Rhineland monastery more than 850 years ago. To her, wind was not weather. It was the force that keeps everything alive. In her cosmology, the winds hold the order of the world in place.

Four centuries later, in La Mancha, a nobleman saw the same thing and read it the wrong way round:

“At this point they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that there are on that plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, ‘Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves.’” — Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I, ch. VIII (1605; trans. John Ormsby)

Don Quixote saw giants. Sancho saw mills. Both were partly right: those mills were the most advanced infrastructure of their day, machines that turned an invisible resource into flour, which is to say into food and money. Any infrastructure investor still asks Sancho’s question: what is really out there, and what does it produce?

How we have used the wind

The history of wind is the history of infrastructure:

• Sails. For millennia wind was transport. The Manila Galleon crossed the Pacific for 250 years carrying Guanajuato silver, pushed by the trade winds.
• Mills. Persia, then Europe: grinding grain and pumping water. The Netherlands was literally built by mills that pumped the sea off the land.
• Water-pumping windmills. On ranches and haciendas across northern and central Mexico, the steel-bladed papalote pumping water into a trough is still part of the landscape.
• Wind turbines. Since the 1980s, wind has produced grid-scale electricity. A single offshore turbine now exceeds 15 MW.

Each stage multiplied what we could draw from the same air. The next one is already happening at sea.

Mexico: close to 8 GW, concentrated in five states

Mexico ended 2024 with 7,782 MW of wind in operation, according to the Mexican Wind Energy Association (AMDEE), across some 70 farms in 15 states. Federal planning adds another 2,180 MW, which would take the country past 10 GW before 2030.

The distribution is very uneven. Five states hold more than 80%:

State	Wind capacity
Oaxaca	2,758 MW
Tamaulipas	1,715 MW
Nuevo León	793 MW
Coahuila	397 MW
Baja California	303 MW

AMDEE puts the country’s onshore potential at about 50 GW. We are using less than a sixth of it.

And the Bajío?

The Bajío is not wind country. It is an agricultural and industrial valley sheltered by mountain ranges, with moderate winds on the valley floor. The usable resource sits on its high edges, on the plateau that surrounds it:

• Jalisco. The state’s only wind farm is Los Altos, in Ojuelos: 50 MW, 28 turbines, at around 2,500 metres. The Energy Ministry inaugurated it in February 2014, and it sells its power to the state government and ten municipalities.
• San Luis Potosí. Charcas, on the Potosí plateau, hosts Enel Green Power’s Dominica: 200 MW in two phases, the second operating since 2015.
• Querétaro. Huimilpan has had a 30 MW farm (15 turbines of 2 MW) since late 2023. The state energy agency says the site could grow to 100 MW.
• Guanajuato has no utility-scale wind farm in operation.

The pattern is clear: where the wider Bajío has wind, it has small projects of 30 to 100 MW. None comes close to the farms in Oaxaca or Tamaulipas.

Why does Jalisco have so little?

Jalisco has 340 kilometres of coastline, heavy industry, the country’s second-largest metropolitan area and a power demand that relies heavily on electricity generated in other regions. Yet it has 50 MW of wind. There are three reasons:

1. The onshore resource is in one place. Jalisco’s usable wind is concentrated in the northern Altos, on the border with Zacatecas and Aguascalientes. The rest of the state is mountains, valleys or coast with irregular winds.
2. The western grid is saturated. As we wrote in “Permitting is no longer the problem”, the region’s bottleneck is no longer paperwork but transmission capacity. A wind farm without a line does not sell a single kilowatt-hour.
3. The Pacific coast is deep. This is the less obvious part. Mexico’s Pacific continental shelf is narrow: a few kilometres off the beach, the seabed is already deeper than 60 metres. That rules out fixed-bottom foundations, the mature and cheaper offshore technology. A study published in Renewable Energy in 2025, which applied depth, fishing, protected-area and port-distance criteria, found no viable fixed offshore wind zone off Jalisco. What remains is floating wind, which is more expensive and still early-stage worldwide.

What the Danes and the Germans did

Hildegard was German. It is no accident that modern wind power, and offshore wind above all, became an industry in northern Europe.

• Denmark built the world’s first offshore wind farm, Vindeby, in 1991: 11 turbines 1.5 to 3 km off the coast of Lolland, enough for about 2,200 homes. It was retired in 2017 after producing 243 GWh over its lifetime, what seven large turbines now generate in a single year. In 2025 wind produced around 60% of Denmark’s electricity, the highest share in the world.
• Germany ended 2025 with 1,680 offshore turbines and 9.7 GW connected in the North Sea and the Baltic, 6.2% of its power production. Its 30 GW target for 2030 will be missed: the August 2025 auction drew not a single bid, and the industry expects to reach about 20 GW. The brake, as in Mexico, is the grid connection. Together with Denmark it is building the 3 GW Bornholm energy island.

The lesson for Mexico cuts two ways. Offshore wind went from 11 experimental turbines to an industry in thirty years. And even the countries that master it get stuck on the grid.

The wind we don’t use: the sea

Mexico has more than 11,000 kilometres of coastline and not a single turbine at sea. The potential is huge:

• The World Bank (ESMAP) estimates Mexico’s offshore technical potential at 869 GW: 402 GW fixed-bottom and 467 GW floating, within 200 km of the coast.
• That is almost twenty times AMDEE’s estimate of onshore potential (50 GW), and more than a hundred times what is installed on land today.
• With stricter sustainability criteria, the Renewable Energy study narrows the figure to 487 GW in shallow waters, which is still 61 times the onshore wind capacity installed at the end of 2024.

Where is that wind? Almost all of it is in the Gulf of Mexico: Yucatán (306 GW) and Campeche (151 GW) account for more than 90% of the viable zones. Next come the Gulf of California (13 GW), Tamaulipas (10 GW) and the Gulf of Tehuantepec (4 GW).

Why has nothing been built? Offshore wind is absent from official power-sector planning, there is no regulatory framework to lease the seabed, the components are not made in Mexico, and the projects put forward (Oaxaca in 2004, San Felipe in 2014, a legislative initiative in 2020) went nowhere. By 2023, Brazil had already received applications for more than 170 GW.

What we do

At Bajío Ventures we don’t see giants or mills. We see megawatts, nodes and contracts. Specifically:

• We match resource with grid. Good wind far from a substation with spare capacity is worth little. Our entity map of the Bajío layers the resource, transmission infrastructure and CENACE local marginal prices together.
• We look for hybrids, not stand-alone farms. Wind often blows in hours when solar output is low. Wind, solar and storage behind the same interconnection point make better use of a scarce grid.
• We size demand before supply. Industry in the corridor, starting with the Bajío’s German-origin plants, needs firm, predictable power. Wind only makes sense for a plant if it arrives in a contract the plant can use.
• We track the sea. Offshore wind in Mexico is today a policy question, not a bankable project. Once a seabed framework exists, the Gulf will be one of the largest resources in the hemisphere, and Bajío industry will be a transmission line away.

Hildegard saw in the wind the unseen life that sustains everything. Cervantes taught us to tell what we imagine from what is really there. Mexico has the wind. What it lacks is the grid, the rules and the decision to use it.

Sources: Hildegard of Bingen, Liber Divinorum Operum, I.1, trans. N. M. Campbell · AMDEE — Mexico moves towards 10 GW of wind · Energía Estratégica — 50 GW wind potential per AMDEE · Petróleo y Energía — top 5 wind states · La Jornada — Los Altos wind farm inaugurated (2014) · SENER — Jalisco’s first wind farm · IDB / Zofnass — Dominica I and II wind farm · Somos Industria — Querétaro produces wind power · World Bank / ESMAP — offshore wind technical potential in Mexico · Renewable Energy (2025) — viable offshore wind zones in Mexico · Forbes México — Offshore wind: when in Mexico? (2023) · State of Green — Vindeby · Scandinavia Standard — Denmark, 60% wind in 2025 · BWO — German offshore wind 2025 · Clean Energy Wire — German offshore wind