FAILURE RATE AND REPAIR TIME ANALYSIS OF OFFSHORE WIND TURBINES

Offshore wind turbines have several advantages over onshore turbines, such as greater efficiency and the ability to generate greater amounts of energy in a more constant manner. Despite this, the Levelized Cost of Energy of onshore wind turbines is still lower than for offshore wind turbines, and the main reason for this difference comes from the operating and maintenance costs. For this reason, optimize the operating and maintenance costs of offshore wind turbines represents one of the biggest opportunities to improve the offshore wind industry. However, the lack of failure rates and repair times for the new and bigger offshore turbines prevents the feasibility to develop new reliability analysis that could improve the offshore wind turbines costs. To tackle this problem, this work presents a comparison between the 7MW Levenmouth Demonstration Turbine and a theoretical wind turbine obtained from a literature review, contrasting in this way a data-based analysis against the information available in the literature. The obtained results show the feasibility of data-based analysis and Monte Carlo Simulation comparison to failure rates validation and transfer knowledge from the onshore to offshore wind turbine industry.