Automated wind turbine maintenance scheduling

While many operation and maintenance (O&M) decision support systems (DSS) have been already proposed, a serious research need still exists for wind farm O&M scheduling. O&M planning is a challenging task, as maintenance teams must follow specific procedures when performing their service, which requires working at height in adverse weather conditions. Here, an automated maintenance programming framework is proposed based on real case studies considering available wind speed and wind gust data. The methodology proposed consists on finding the optimal intervention time and the most effective execution order for maintenance tasks and was built on information from regular maintenance visit tasks and a corrective maintenance visit. The objective is to find possible schedules where all work orders can be performed without breaks, and to find out when to start in order to minimise revenue losses (i.e. doing maintenance when there is least wind). For the DSS, routine maintenance tasks are grouped using the findings of an agglomerative nesting analysis. Then, the task execution windows are searched within pre-planned maintenance day.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Wind Energ

The Financial Benefits of Various Catastrophic Failure Prevention Strategies in a Wind Farm: Two market studies (UK-Spain)

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by IOP Publishing under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are avalable at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Operation of wind farms is driven by the overall aim of minimising costs while maximising energy sales. However, in certain circumstances investments are required to guarantee safe operation and survival of an asset. In this paper, we discuss the merits of various catastrophic failure prevention strategies in a Spanish wind farm. The wind farm operator was required to replace blades in two phases: temporary and final repair. We analyse the power performance of the turbine in the different states and investigate four scenarios with different timing of temporary and final repair during one year. The financial consequences of the scenarios are compared with a baseline by using a discounted cash flow analysis that considers the wholesale electricity market selling prices and interest rates. A comparison with the UK electricity market is conducted to highlight differences in the rate of return in the two countries