Performance enhancement of renewable energy systems subject to units’ degradation and performance dependence

Abstract

A performance enhancement model for multi-state renewable energy systems is introduced and developed in this paper. This model’s objective is to provide a maintenance decision support, taking into account units’ degradations and system interdependencies. Performance enhancement actions consider both preventive and corrective strategies and the model’s thresholds are based on units’ performance. The Universal Generating Function was used to assess unit performance, dependence and degradation. A case study is provided based on a simple series–parallel wind energy multi-state system, and the results show how this decision support model can be cost effective and enhance the global performance of the system. Afterwards, importance measure analysis was used to assess the performance thresholds of this model.