Wind Energy Operations & Maintenance 

2010 report:

• O&M costs for wind power are double or triple the figures originally projected; they are particularly high in the U.S.
• There’s a −21% change in wind farm return on investment. This underperformance of wind assets is most likely attributable to both differences in power production and O&M costs over original estimates.
• $0.027/kWh, or €0.019/kWh, is the average values of O&M costs obtained from report surveys. This compares to early estimates by one of the world’s dominant turbine suppliers of $0.005/kWh.
• A significant amount of R&D is currently going into gearbox reliability. Many gearboxes, designed for a 20-year life, are failing after 6 to 8 years of operation.
• Data suggests that O&M challenges for wind turbines peaked in 2007/2008.
• At 2 cents/kWh, O&M costs are roughly equal to the federal production tax credit offered in the U.S. as a subsidy to make wind energy competitive.

2012 report:

• Engineers are still scratching their heads when it comes to gearboxes. Even though gearboxes are certified to operate for 20 years, none of them on today’s market lasts more than 8 years.
• 66% – the percentage of offshore O+M costs that are caused by unscheduled corrective maintenance
• 2-6 times higher – offshore wind turbines O+M costs compared with on-shore
• 10% – the loss in revenue due to the effect of spattered debris accumulation on the blade’s leading edge
• €100,000 to €300,000 per year – the costs of keeping offshore turbines online vs. an allocation of €45,000 per turbine for onshore wind

2017 report:

As part of our research into failure rates, costs and downtime on US Wind Farms, we have built a model which estimates lifetime costs of scheduled maintenance for a wind farm in the US. The input data used to build this data pack is a 210MW wind farm made up of 105 2MW turbines of 80 metres in height. The tables below show component risk factors, periodic maintenance costs, failure scenarios and supply chain factors [all costs USD]. CMS [complete monitoring system] options play an increasingly important role in both mean time to repair and the time between failures. As a result they have a large impact on costs. These are also taken into account. Finally the data pack provides major component lifetime O&M cost for the wind farm.

Scheduled maintenance cost—
Frequency per year: 2
Cost per action per turbine: $6,000
Reduced cost: $5,100
Lifetime cost per farm: $21,420,000

Component risk factors—

Supply chain risk factors—

CMS factors (per turbine)—

We have also looked at failure rates across different turbine technology types and designs. The graph below shows major component failure rates for all types of turbines in our dataset during the first ten years of operations. Different failure modes have different repair times, ultimately leading to different costs.