Modelling Wind Turbine Failures based on Weather Conditions

A large proportion of the overall costs of a wind farm is directly related to operation and maintenance (O&M) tasks. By applying predictive O&M strategies rather than corrective approaches these costs can be decreased significantly. Here, especially wind turbine (WT) failure models can help to understand the components' degradation processes and enable the operators to anticipate upcoming failures. Usually, these models are based on the age of the systems or components. However, latest research shows that the on-site weather conditions also affect the turbine failure behaviour significantly. This study presents a novel approach to model WT failures based on the environmental conditions to which they are exposed to. The results focus on general WT failures, as well as on four main components: gearbox, generator, pitch and yaw system. A penalised likelihood estimation is used in order to avoid problems due to for example highly correlated input covariates. The relative importance of the model covariates is assessed in order to analyse the effect of each weather parameter on the model output