An Integrated and Generic Approach for Effective Offshore Wind Farm Operations & Maintenance

Due to renewable energy regulations, wind energy becomes more attractive and the offshore wind sector is growing significantly the recent years. Operations and Maintenance (O&M) of offshore wind farms facing more challenges and is more expensive, compared to the O&M of onshore wind farms. O&M costs of offshore wind farms are on average double as high compared to onshore wind farms. This is mainly caused by the cost intensive maritime resources required for O&M and uncertainty of offshore weather conditions, while latest research indicates that the O&M of offshore wind farms can be more effective. Weather conditions have a substantial impact on the production, cost, and planning of offshore wind farms which require O&M strategies that minimize production losses and O&M costs, while making sure scheduled maintenance tasks are completed in time. Previous research show a lack of an approach that is 1) integrated: including all the stakeholders’ requirements that are necessary to assess the effectiveness of the O&M in terms of production, cost, and planning and 2) generic: applicable for all wind farms. This master thesis identified first all the requirements for an integrated and generic O&M decision support tool. By means of literature research and interviews with stakeholders in the offshore wind sector, all the requirements for modelling an integrated and generic O&M tool are gathered and verified, supporting the offshore wind O&M plan and process. 35 model requirements are identified covering wind farm parameters, O&M strategies, external factors, O&M effectiveness indicators and tool capabilities. Of these requirements, 9 are not or partly fulfilled by the examined studies or tools. The main gaps in the current research are related to the option to perform only maintenance during low wind speeds, the planning aspect covering the feasibility and robustness of maintenance plans, the insight in the O&M process (e.g. visualization or process animation) and to the optimization capability. The second part of this thesis focused on the conceptualization and implementation of all the identified requirements into one O&M tool. The developed tool, based on discrete event simulation covered all the identified gaps in the current research besides all the other stakeholders’ requirements, apart from some spare parts logistics requirements which are simplified included with assumptions. The developed tool enable users to compare optimize different O&M strategies (covering the resource configuration and deployment options) on all the KPIs of the O&M plan and process, to optimize the O&M strategies and to gain insight in the maintenance process in order to find the optimum in the production, cost, and planning trade-off triangle, taking into account all the requirements. After the implementation in the discrete event simulation software the tool is verified and validated by means of a model comparison with the validated ECN O&M tool and an expert validation with an actor from the offshore wind sector. The results is a verified and validated tool that is demonstrated with a fictitious cases study in the last part of this thesis. The tool can be improved on several aspects, most notably by performing a real validation project for a maintenance campaign of an existing wind farm. Other recommended improvements implying further research are extending the scope regarding the inventory aspect, including the option to incorporate historical data for condition based maintenance, including more transporters, extending the model with a user-friendly interface around the actual tool and integrating forecast weather data to enable day-to-day planning.Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and ManagementSystems EngineeringTechnology, Policy and Managemen