Abstract
AbstractThe fast‐growing offshore wind energy sector brings opportunities to provide a sustainable energy resource but also challenges in offshore wind turbine (OWT) operation and maintenance management. Existing operational simulation models assume deterministic input reliability and failure cost data, whereas OWT reliability and failure costs vary depending on several factors, and it is often not possible to specify them with certainty. This paper focuses on modelling reliability and failure cost uncertainties and their impacts on OWT operational and economic performance. First, we present a probabilistic method for modelling reliability data uncertainty with a quantitative parameter estimation from available reliability data resources. Then, failure cost uncertainty is modelled using fuzzy logic that relates a component's failure cost to its capital cost and downtime. A time‐sequential Monte Carlo simulation is presented to simulate operational sequences of OWT components. This operation profile is later fed into a fuzzy cost assessment and coupled with a wind power curve model to evaluate OWT availability, energy production, operational expenditures and levelised cost of energy. A case study with different sets of reliability data is presented, and the results show that impacts of uncertainty on OWT performance are magnified in databases with low components' reliability. In addition, both reliability and cost uncertainties can contribute to more than 10% of the cost of energy variation. This research can provide practitioners with methods to handle data uncertainties in reliability and operational simulation of OWTs and help them to quantify the variability and dependence of wind power performance on data uncertainties.
Highlights
Offshore wind energy has grown rapidly in the last decade, and it is still expected to rise in the coming years
This paper models two types of uncertainties related to reliability and cost data and incorporates them into an offshore wind turbine (OWT) operational simulation framework
These are integrated into an OWT reliability and operational simulation framework under uncertainties, and the timesequential Monte Carlo simulation (TSMCS) is employed to investigate the impacts of uncertainty on the operational and economic performance of OWTs
Summary
Offshore wind energy has grown rapidly in the last decade, and it is still expected to rise in the coming years. It has been shown that simulation is a powerful and flexible tool for analysing OWT operation, and several O&M simulation studies have been performed.[18] input data uncertainty is a critical factor that wind energy system operators need to deal with,[19] existing simulation models vastly ignore the uncertainties of data in reliability and O&M cost evaluation.[9,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32] this paper focuses on modelling two types of uncertainties related to reliability data and failure cost of OWT components.
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