On the Relevance of Reliability Assessment for Wind Farm Performance Evaluation

To assess the available power output of a wind farm reliability modelling are used accounting for the stochastic nature of the wind energy source, the control characteristics of the wind turbine generators and the related failure and repair processes. Two techniques are adopted with reference to a case study. The first one is based on Monte Carlo simulations and evaluates the power output of a wind farm neglecting the outages of wind turbine generators. The second one evaluates the available power output using a novel technique based on the Universal Generating Functions. The results obtained by the two techniques are compared to evidence the effects of taking into account failures on the expected generated energy as well as on generation costs. It is also analysed the sensitivity of the results with respect to variations of the failure parameters.