Availability growth and state-of-knowledge uncertainty simulation for offshore wind power plants

The use of new offshore wind turbine designs in uncertain environments introduces considerable systemic performance risks. Current availability models fail to represent these risks adequately even though they could lead to significant under-performance of windfarm availability. Serial early failures lead to loss of generation and costly mitigation activities. In this paper we present a model for offshore wind power plant availability growth that captures both systemic uncertainty and natural variability on availability assessments, and represents the effect of interventions in the failure and repair processes. Our model is a decision-support tool designed to inform management decisions to implement measures to reduce uncertainties and grow availability more effectively and efficiently. We demonstrate the use of the model, which is developed in MATLAB, by using an illustrative example of a fictitious offshore wind power plant.