Failure rate, repair time and unscheduled O&M cost analysis of offshore wind turbines

James Carroll*, Alasdair McDonald, David McMillan

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

517 Citations (Scopus)
1804 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Determining and understanding offshore wind turbine failure rates and resource requirement for repair are vital for modelling and reducing O&M costs and in turn reducing the cost of energy. While few offshore failure rates have been published in the past even less details on resource requirement for repair exist in the public domain. Based on ~350 offshore wind turbines throughout Europe this paper provides failure rates for the overall wind turbine and its sub-assemblies. It also provides failure rates by year of operation, cost category and failure modes for the components/sub-assemblies that are the highest contributor to the overall failure rate. Repair times, average repair costs and average number of technicians required for repair are also detailed in this paper. An onshore to offshore failure rate comparison is carried out for generators and converters based on this analysis and an analysis carried out in a past publication. The results of this paper will contribute to offshore wind O&M cost and resource modelling and aid in better decision making for O&M planners and managers.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1107-1119
Number of pages13
JournalWind Energy
Volume19
Issue number6
Early online date6 Aug 2015
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2016

Keywords

  • failure mode
  • failure rate
  • offshore wind turbine
  • reliability

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