Wind turbine downtime and its importance for offshore deployment

TLDR

Wind turbine performance and efficiency have improved over time, yet reliability—especially for offshore deployment—remains a challenge, a gap IWES has addressed through decades of operational data collection. The study aims to extract reliability characteristics of wind turbines and analyze failure frequency and downtime of subassemblies to anticipate offshore deployment outcomes. Statistical analysis is based on data from Germany’s “250 MW Wind” programme, evaluated by IWES. Findings indicate that failure frequency and downtime vary across subassemblies, with implications for offshore reliability that mirror onshore experience. © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract

Abstract While the performance and the efficiency of wind turbines and their energy yields have been improved with time, their reliability still needs improvement, particularly when considering their deployment offshore. IWES has been gathering operational experience from wind turbines since 1989, being involved in different projects dealing with the topic of availability and reliability. This paper draws statistical data from Germany's ‘250 MW Wind’ programme, evaluated by IWES. The prime objective of the survey was to extract information about the reliability characteristics of wind turbines. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the frequency of failures and duration of downtimes for different wind turbine subassemblies based on existing onshore experience and point out the likely outcomes when turbines are deployed offshore. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.