Posters

Abstract

The offshore wind industry is an emerging and still developing sector, specially floating offshore wind. Initially, all the research and efforts made by the stakeholders involved were focused on the technology development (wind turbine and support structure), leaving aside theOperation and Maintenance (O&M) field. Based on bottom fixed offshore wind farm, it can be concluded that O&M accounts for 30% of the cost required for the establishment of an Offshore Wind Farm. Therefore, it is necessary to undertake as much research as possible to enhance the understanding in this field to minimise operating risks, as well as to achieve competitive Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) rates. Several researchers have found that offshore wind farm O&M has to be studied at a component level. Mainly because failure rates are different of all of them and because they are not constant along the lifespan but vary according to a bathtub curve distribution. However, most of the O&M simulators are using nowadays constant failure rates leading to poor O&M predictions. The present research aims to fill the following knowledge gaps: (1) to analyse the importance of the number of O&M vessels required per wind farm given the randomness associated to the component failure and (2) the deep into the importance of components' failure rates over the feasibility of an offshore wind farm. Both key factors have a strong influence over the technical-economic feasibility of a wind farm, therefore they deserve to be analysed based on new O&M simulation tools capable to leverage the offshore wind sector up to higher rates of efficiency.