Potential Analysis for the Monetary Based Maintenance Optimization of Wind Turbines

As an increasing number of wind turbines will be phasing out of the fixed feed-in tariff by 2021, a significant and constantly growing part of those have to participate in the electricity spot market in free competition to sell the generated electricity. Hence, current maintenance strategies as well as availability definitions, which only focus on maximizing energy production, will no longer suitable for assessing the intended performance of a wind turbine. At this point, the importance of monetary-based availability becomes attractive for operators whose objective is to increase the financial revenue of their operating wind power plant. This thesis investigates the potential improvements of monetary-based maintenance planning on the revenue from generated wind power by taking multiple influencing factors into account. By conducting an empirical study of the data set, it has been observed that continuous power production by wind power plants will not necessarily have a positive outcome in present circumstances due to ever-changing electricity market prices. The results also reveal that by shifting even only a little proportion of total maintenance activities to the optimum period, the relative reduction of financial losses can be raised by a sufficient amount.