Economic Viability Study for Offshore Wind Turbines Maintenance Management

Nowadays, there is a growing interest in the development of offshore wind farms due to the increasing size and capacity of wind turbines, improvement of wind resources, social acceptance, noise reduction, depletion of onshore locations with great wind resources, etc. However, the operation and maintenance (O&M) costs are too high to make offshore wind turbines economically viable. The use of condition monitoring systems (CMS) appears as a solution to minimize O&M costs and increase the reliability of offshore wind farms. The quantification of the economic benefits of CMS is a non-trivial problem. In this work is presented a novel maintenance management research based of an economic study of the Life Cycle Cost (LCC) of CMS for offshore wind turbines. The model includes the costs of investment and O&M of the CMS and costs for reduction of O&M and energy losses of the wind turbine generates by the implementation of CMS. These costs are related with a reliability analysis of a real case study. The application of the economic model on a real case study assuming different scenarios enables the analysis of the economic benefits to use CMS in offshore wind turbines