State of the art in Operation and Maintenance planning of offshore wind farms

Operation and Maintenance (O&M) costs of offshore wind farms are large contributors to the cost of energy. During last decades, methods have been developed for assessing the corrective maintenance costs, and many studies have been published for planning of preventive maintenance, but yet maintenance is not planned using advanced methods by taking all available information into account in a consistent manner. In this paper first a short literature review in O&M models for cost calculation of corrective maintenance and planning of preventive maintenance is given. Furthermore, an O&M study for a reference offshore wind farm is presented to illustrate the average costs and downtime for a typical offshore wind farm and to justify the necessity and potential of further development of current O&M models. At the end, a discussion on optimal O&M planning of offshore wind farms is given.