Staying Ahead of Wind Turbine Reliability Issues in 2024 and Beyond

Introduction to Turbine Reliability Issues

In recent years wind turbine reliability has become an increasing focus for the wind industry, as a result in asset complexity, squeezed margins, and a greater need for efficiency and predictability in the renewable energy sector in general. In a recent poll conducted by ONYX Insight as part of our ‘Everchanging Winds‘ report, turbine reliability was listed as one of the top 3 challenges for operators, alongside supply chain and OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) challenges.

Throughout the past decade, there has been an unprecedented pace of technological development in wind turbines, with more intricate designs and larger sizes aimed at reducing the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) of wind energy. While these innovations are often already utilized across other industries, their track record in wind is often limited which increases the uncertainty around future performance and reliability.

This is particularly interesting for offshore wind technology, where the pace of technology development means that developers often consider turbines that have barely left design drawing boards. At the same time, significant O&M costs and a shortage of large jack-up vessels mean much greater long-term visibility of assets’ health is required. This is even more critical for projects with floating foundations as these assets are located even further offshore and introduce additional challenges in O&M activities.

According to this analysis by sea-impact.com, throughout the first half of 2023, 37% of offshore vessel interventions were on turbines rated at 6MW+, this is compared to only 8% in 2020. This increase is driven partly by the rise of offshore turbines with higher ratings, but also the increasing number of large-scale major component retrofit and repair campaigns in recent years.

Echoing this, ONYX’s ‘Ever Changing Wind’ report also revealed that 69% of operators surveyed expect more reliability issues due to aging assets, and 56% anticipate challenges due to the introduction of new technologies.

How can developers reduce the risk of potential reliability issues?

1. Get on Top of New Designs

So how should new turbine technologies with limited track records be approached by developers? In-depth engineering design analysis is essential for the assessment of future technology risk and more accurate financial modeling.  Such analysis needs to look at technology evolution – is it simply a scaled-up version of an existing model, or are there fundamental changes to the design? It is essential to assess the sensitivity to loads and manufacturing, as well as evaluate the ease of assembling components in the field. The supply chain is also becoming more important as many OEMs are facing profitability challenges alongside a greater degree of vertical integration.

The future reliability of individual design elements can then be extrapolated using historical field data. ONYX relies on its extensive database of over 20,000 monitored turbines with more than 9,000 major component failures detected a year to evaluate future turbine technologies. This approach helps in accurately projecting failure rates and identifying potential areas of concern in newer platforms where the data may not yet be available.

2. Plan for the Day-to-Day and the Worst Day

When signing a wind farm contract, it is crucial to consider not only the initial project development but also the operational stage of the turbine lifecycle. A recent survey showed that 63% of respondents are now giving significant consideration to the operational stage of the lifecycle during project development.

Not only does this include planning for day-to-day operations, such as data access and reporting, component failure management, and component replacement, but also ensuring robust contract provisions are in place to recover costs and have access to the right information during more serious events like a serial defect.

3. Conduct OPEX Forecasting for Risk Management

Having a flexible OPEX model that can be used for assessment of different scenarios and cost impact of potential mitigation solutions, is another effective tool to reduce the uncertainty in future planning.

ONYX is using a bottom-up approach that considers site-specific and turbine-specific parameters as well as project-specific O&M strategies, ONYX’s OPEX Forecasting service allows for modeling specific scenarios. This approach covers a range from best-case to worst-case OPEX costings, helping evaluate different turbines and define the cost-of-ownership of an entire farm, beyond just the initial purchase price.

Interestingly, an increasing number of asset owners are evaluating their O&M strategy and using OPEX forecasting to evaluate ROI of different maintenance scenarios.

Traditionally, asset owners preferred to outsource the risk of maintenance to OEMs through Full-Service Agreements (FSAs). However, our ‘Ever Changing Winds’ report revealed that 67% of asset owners expect OEM market share in FSA’s to decrease. This shift is influenced by a decline in maintenance service quality as available technical resources are getting increasingly stretched and also by OEMs protecting their service margins by being more selective on contract terms and pricing.

As a result, asset owners are increasingly looking to in-house some aspects of O&M activities and optimise OPEX as well as increase their control over assets’ operations.

Technologies that can help reduce reliability uncertainty

Reliability uncertainty within the industry has been met with an increased use in predictive technologies that can help detect failures before they occur providing significant reduction in O&M costs, greater operational efficiency, and increased power production.

Predictive technologies have been commonplace in the industry for over a decade, however as turbines get increasingly complex owners have looked to expand the scope of traditional drivetrain condition monitoring systems to other components such as blades, foundations, towers, rotor and BoP.