Economic Evaluation of Maintenance Strategies for Offshore Wind Turbines Based on Condition Monitoring Systems

An offshore wind farm's cost of energy is, to a large extent, driven by operation and maintenance costs. Through the optimization of the maintenance strategies for offshore wind farms, the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) will be further reduced, which will ceteris paribus lead to a higher competitiveness of offshore wind farms with other energy sources. This study pro-poses an event-based simulation of an offshore wind farm comprising 400 MW. The aim of the model is to minimize the total cost, and thus to maximize the revenues from the wind farm. Therefore, corrective, condition-based, and scheduled maintenance strategies are compared, and constraints, such as weather conditions and service team shifts, are taken into consideration. When hourly electricity spot prices are applied instead of feed-in tariffs, results show that weekly scheduled maintenance on a Saturday dayshift (starting at 8 am) is the most cost-efficient scenario. Condition monitoring systems have been found to be advantageous and are set as a standard application regarding the turbines. The impact of scheduled maintenance frequency, the distance between the offshore site and the coast, the interest rate, and altering reliability data are further analyzed