Through-life engineering services of wind turbines

The exponential yearly growth seen in the past decade in wind energy power generation has resulted from immense support by governments across the world for alternative energy. The implication of this has led to a shift of wind farm (WF) projects from small scale isolated installations into complex utility scale power generation systems comprising of arrays of large wind turbines (WTs), whose development, installation and operation are constrained by extreme and hostile environments. However, this has increased the need for through-life engineering service (TES) for WTs especially in offshore applications, where the operations and maintenance (O&M) becomes more complicated as a result of the harsh marine weather and environmental conditions. In this paper, a generic methodology for benchmarking TES in industries is presented and used to assess TES in the wind industry. This was done by identifying the current state-of-the-art in methods and applications, requirements and needs, challenges, and opportunities of TES in the wind sector. Furthermore an illustrative case study on WT gearbox through-life support is presented to demonstrate the potential opportunities and applications of TES in the wind industry.