The impact of maintenance contract arrangements on the yield of offshore wind power plants

Abstract

In the optimisation of maintenance and vessel strategies for the operation of offshore wind plant, it is normally assumed that the off-taker of the power produced may directly control the dispatch of maintenance resources. However, in practice, services such as maintenance technicians and vessels are usually contracted from companies with larger arenas of operation, and so the organisational interfaces between these parties, and the different objective functions involved, need to be considered. This article looks at different current and future models for contracted maintenance, identifies interfaces and conflicts of interest, and constructs a quantified model demonstrating the potential impact on headline energy yields for a set of wind farms with a common contracted maintenance resource. The modelling illustrates that the performance of a site with contracted maintenance operations is not only dependent on the contracts held by that site but also on the effective competition in place with other sites for a centralised resource, and the performance of a site may be highly sensitive to the alignment of contractual incentives, relative travel distances, and the relative size of the site in terms of energy yield

A Bayesian reliability analysis exploring the effect of scheduled maintenance on wind turbine time to failure

“…It is common practice in the industry to have an annual campaign where a set of scheduled maintenance actions are carried out on turbines. The exact nature of these actions vary from one service provider to the next and depend largely on maintenance contract arrangements 66 . Contracts generally assign up to 60 downtime hours per year towards these services; however, a recent study by Anderson et al 12 estimates the number to be around 29 h/year.…”

“…The exact nature of these actions vary from one service provider to the next and depend largely on maintenance contract arrangements. 66 Contracts generally assign up to 60 downtime hours per year towards these services; however, a recent study by…”

Satellite data for the offshore renewable energy sector: Synergies and innovation opportunities

“…Within this phase the owner has limited control over how the site is run, depending on how contracts are arranged, and weather associated risks can in some cases be outsourced to the OEM. The agreements secured in these maintenance contracts have important implications for site yield Hawker and McMillan (2015) in the early years. Post-warranty, site operators can choose to sign a new long term contract with the OEM, appoint a third party or bring these operations in-house.…”

Modeling Epistemic Uncertainty in Offshore Wind Farm Production Capacity to Reduce Risk

“…In particular, they enable accounting of the costs of lost production depending on the underlying reasons. The appropriateness of energy based rather than purely technical availability measures for engineering models of farm performance has been examined by (Conroy, Deane, & Ó Gallachóir, 2011; Hawker & McMillan, 2015), contributing to a debate partly informed by the contracting experiences for early generation offshore wind farms (Feng, Tavner, & Long, 2010). This is a level of detail not required for this article, hence the choice of definition made here.…”