Performance, reliability and failure analysis of wind farm in a developing Country

In this paper, an analysis of the performance, failure and reliability, as well as a spare parts analysis have been conducted for a wind farm, which has 15 wind turbine generators (WTGs), each of 225 kW capacity. This wind farm is located at Muppandal, Tamil Nadu, South India. The average value of performance parameters such as technical availability, real availability and capacity factor for the wind farm were 94%, 82.88% and 24.9% respectively during the years 2000-2004. This paper also deals with Pareto analysis to find out the reduction in problems, when one problem is tackled partly and completely. The Weibull technique was also used for the reliability analysis. The reliability factor in the initial period after one year seems to be good as the wind farm has a lower failure rate of 0.000019. As a supplemental activity, spare parts optimization was also carried out for a few vital components of this wind farm and the results are presented. The failure and its financial implications are also analyzed in this paper. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.