With 52.4 GW of new onshore capacity installed, 472GW of installed capacity globally, and an ageing fleet, the importance of O&M continues to grow. However, the market is not purely driven by new installations as research shows promising signs of a new wave of repowering both in North America and Europe with significant growth expected from 2020 onwards.

Further analysis has been conducted on retrofitting and the advantages to mature assets. The report weighs up asset management strategies and late life investment options, drawing on real project case studies and interviews.

New turbine failure data revealed

Research by WEBS and New Energy Update has gathered decades of operational data across several turbine types to analyse failure rates on key components. The report covers many turbine types and delivers unique insight into performance. One result in particular for DFIM turbines - under 1 megawatt capacity - finds that many of the failures occur in year seven.

The report looks at failure rates and repair times for onshore turbines around the world. Analysis of the mean time to repair failures on variable resistance turbines indicates that drive train components take the longest time to repair, most other component failures are resolved quickly. In year nine there are more serious generator failures which also take a significant amount of time to repair.

Keith Harrison, Head of Knowledge Management at WEBS  commented: "Benchmarking Wind O&M performance can provide wind farm stakeholders with valuable evidence to support investment and supplier negotiations, as well as delivering an assessment of production, availability and reliability performance against peers. The Wind O&M Report provides a useful tool for doing so."

Unique insight into the Wind Energy O&M market

The 2017 Wind Energy O&M report combines case studies and statistical analysis to:

 ·        Identify the optimum maintenance strategy for gearboxes, generators and blades:  A proprietary scorecard you can use to select the optimum maintenance strategy for your assets.

 ·        Evaluate Retrofitting and Repowering: Explore Repowering, Retrofitting and End-of-Warranty options.

 ·        Understand the latest condition monitoring capabilities and their impact on asset O&M strategies.

 ·        Benchmark wind assets ´ reliability against the market: New insight into failure rates and repair times for key components across Danish, Variable Resistance, DFIM and Direct Drive turbines.

 ·        Access failure rates and repair time data for key components: Yaw System, control and protection system, generator system, turbine transmission system, rotor system, blade adjustment system and many more.

 "Our data indicates post-warranty failure rate trends for different turbine models vary widely. This will have a strong bearing on the size and nature of the Wind O&M market as larger, newer turbines enter end of warranty. This report is also the first systematic examination of the repowering and retrofit markets and suggests these will both be strong growth areas in Europe and the US over the years ahead."

Louis Vye, Business Intelligence Manager, New Energy Update

Wind Energy O&M Report 2017 | www.windenergyupdate.com/onshore-wind-operations-maintenance-report/