Sensitivity analysis of offshore wind farm topology based on reliability calculation

In order to reduce the revenue losses for the offshore wind farm (OWF) operators, it is necessary to ensure the operational availability of the entire OWF. This requires an accurate investigation of the reliability of the individual components of OWF as well as of the complete system. For this reason, reliability calculations will play a major role in the planning and optimization of the network infrastructure. Due to the OWF specific grid construction and the environment-relevant factors such as: long distance to shore, water depth and rough environmental conditions for maintenance activities, new offshore specifics reliability models were evolved. The newly developed models take into account the necessity of the wind´s potential, weather conditions, control of power generation, automatic functions in case of failure of the OWF grid and the wind turbine generator (WTG) itself. By means of these models, this paper focuses on the availability of various OWF design concepts. These variants consider the differences within inter array layouts, substation configurations and WTG concepts. Their impacts on the reliability results are substantiated by calculations, which make possible to identify the advantages and disadvantages of each OWF design concept.