Cost of Wind Turbine O&M

Cutting costs by preventing failure instead of running wind turbines until they break lies at the heart
of a new approach to operations and maintenance.

Mass production of wind turbines on an industrial scale is not yet a decade old, and few turbine
models have operated in large numbers for more than a handful of years. Robust operational data
remains a relatively scarce commodity, and even expert technicians have been reliant on little
more than anecdotal data regarding what component is likely to fail when on which turbine, or
how trouble can be averted before it happens.

More recently, however, owners, operators and developers have been looking to the cost of
running the projects, and are recognising the value in preventing failure instead of running turbines
until they break.
Two components of the cost of operation and maintenance (O&M) of wind turbines are vitally
important and need to be minimised: those for scheduled maintenance and for unscheduled
maintenance. If component failures lead to unscheduled stoppages, then the additional cost of loss
of electricity sales is introduced. That is why considerable efforts are being made to control and
forecast such failures.
There are three ways of expressing O&M costs. The simplest way is to assume that the total
annual charges represent a percentage of the installed cost, often quoted between 3% and 5%.

which can be expressed as a cost per yearly power output, or per hourly electricity generated,
which is used here.
The inexactitude of the science of calculating O&M costs begins with the variety of ingredients
that make up the whole in addition to scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. The diagram
below shows data taken from an analysis four years ago from sister publication Windstats,
showing that the costs of O&M ranged from €15-26/MWh and, while this is an average, there
are significant variations both above and below the estimates quoted. The latest data from the
International Energy Agency, reporting from 12 different countries, gives a similar range of €7-
26/MWh.

My 2 cents....