Protections impact on the availability of a wind power plant operating in real conditions

This paper addresses a number of aspects referred to availability of the wind turbines operating in a wind power plant. Starting from the experimental data gathered on-site through SCADA systems, and from a recorded data indicating the operation of various types of protections, the causes of unavailability are investigated in terms of determining the impact of the different types of failures as represented by the tripping of the corresponding protections. The results obtained show that the variability of occurrence and duration of the protection tripping for the different wind turbines is relatively high. This impacts on the identification of suitable values and shapes of the failure parameters that can be used to build a reliability model of the wind power plant with probabilistic entries. For this purpose, some indications for constructing a probabilistic model of the protection operation are provided, also taking into account the possible simultaneous tripping of the protections due to mutually dependent events.