Optimising Maintenance Planning at Offshore Wind Farms

The UK R&D Renewables team has developed an automated scheduling tool which could save up to 50% on revenue losses from when the wind farm is not operating.

Planning maintenance at offshore wind farms is incredibly challenging due to the uncertainties involved. Operation and Maintenance (O&M) costs account for roughly 30% of the lifetime costs of an offshore wind farm. As wind farms get larger and move further from shore, these costs are expected to increase.

Managing uncertainties

Planning the maintenance at offshore wind farms is challenging. Tasks can only be performed if the weather conditions are good enough, the technicians and spare parts are available and a vessel is ready to transport them. Any plans need to consider all of these elements in addition to different planning timescales for different jobs.

Automatic planning

UK R&D Renewables, through an Offshore Renewable Energy Industrial Doctorate Centre Engineering Doctorate (IDCORE EngD) project, has developed a framework and set of optimisation tools to automatically plan annual and daily maintenance. The wind farm operator can input the parameters and lists of jobs, and the tools provide the teams with schedules and daily vessel routes that aim to minimise the costs and revenue losses of maintenance activities. By testing on historical data from an offshore wind farm, this framework has indicated the potential for 50% reductions in maintenance costs across a year.

Next steps

These methods will be developed further with live tests at wind farms across both France and the UK to gain feedback on their use in an operational setting.