Profit-based O&M strategies for wind power plants

Traditionally O&M for wind power generation systems aims at reducing the overall maintenance cost and improving the availability of the systems. The increasing importance of energy markets together with the foreseen reduction in incentive schemes for renewable energy require to extend the classic maintenance decision process and to consider also market and weather information. In this paper, we propose a model that extend classical maintenance scheduling so to include forecasted market prices and weather conditions. The theoretical and computational aspects employed for the design of the market-based maintenance strategies able to maximize profits are considered. The proposed maintenance schedule optimizes a discounted cumulative profit of a wind generation portfolio in a fixed-time horizon (e.g. two years ahead) subject to the technologically-derived maintenance time constraints. Furthermore, logistics costs are also considered so to evaluate impacts of the location of warehouses. Results point out that taking into account market and weather opportunities in the design of the maintenance strategy allows one to achieve a more complete scheduling for a given set of wind power plants.