Effect of site conditions on offshore wind turbine failures

Failure of offshore wind turbine components is one of the main contributors to the O&M cost and in turn the cost of energy from offshore wind. In order to try and reduce the O&M costs a clear understanding of what drives these failures must be obtained. This paper aims to find a correlation between weather conditions and turbine failures. Site conditions examined include, amongst others, wind speed, turbulence intensity and turbine positioning in the wind farm. A modern population of offshore turbines is analysed in this work. Exact turbine and wind farm numbers, rated power and blade size cannot be provided for confidentiality reasons. The findings of this analysis show that, weather conditions are a key factor to offshore turbine failures.