Wind turbine maintenance covers a range of factors, from manpower to ensuring that mechanical parts are lubricated to avoid any unexpected shutdowns. O&M budgets are often undervalued during the developmental phases of a project but it is a crucial part of the sustained reliability of wind turbines. If you’re working on your next renewable energy project and sharpening your pencil while calculating your O&M costs, here’s a look at the wind turbine maintenance services our qualified technicians offer.
Scheduled Maintenance
Our wind technicians lubricate moving parts on components, such as gearboxes and bearings, and check connections on numerous devices within the system, also resolving any concerns that may develop. This is often performed two to three times per year. ANEMOI ensures that the maintenance checklist provides a client with all the essential information for safe maintenance, cleaning, inspections, testing and replacement tasks that are necessary to ensure the proper operation of generators and associated equipment. We only allow qualified technicians or engineers, who understand the principles of operation of the generator and its control panels to carry out any maintenance.
Manpower Augmentation
We recognize that wind energy project schedules can be complex, with ongoing regular maintenance cycles, everyday troubleshooting, fleet-wide retrofits etc. – which is why we provide long-term skilled and qualified staff to meet the needs of any project. We provide immediate skilled and qualified technicians without frustrating and time-consuming delays that can come with hiring and training personnel. We have the ability to staff long-term and short-term technicians across the country for the following:
laydown yard support
shipping and receiving support
construction support
scheduled or unscheduled maintenance
inspections
retrofits
Gearbox oil changes
We inspect, observe, understand and report any anomalies we find during your oil change. This service entails:
Completely enclosed and self-contained unit to work in most environments without external power source needs.
Temperature controlled tanks to optimize oil flow in any climate
Four segregated oil tanks for waste oil, flush oil (heated), rinse oil (heated), and new product oil (heated and filtered)
New product oil is filtered to iso 4406 standard
A staff certified to perform warranty repairs on gearbox OEM equipment
Retrofits
We pride ourselves on increasing reliability at a lower cost per unit serviced. Many owners and operators are making the decision to retrofit their turbines with new parts, simply to reduce future running costs due to better reliability of the replaced parts and increased productivity. Since parts have a lifespan (and with many turbines reaching their 20-year design lifespan), owners/operators are finding they can retrofit and replace some exhausted end-of-life components to keep their assets online for additional years.
Maintenance costs for wind turbine projects can take up a sizeable chunk of the annual budget, with O&M costs for new turbines easily constituting more than 20% of the cost per kWh produced over a turbine’s lifespan. It is believed that the maintenance costs for modern machines are in the region of 1.5% – 2% per year of the original investment. To keep maintenance costs low in the long-term, scheduled maintenance throughout a turbine’s life cycle is crucial. IHS Markit said in a report that the O&M costs of a U.S. utility-scale wind energy farm were approximately $48 000/MW in 2016 and that the average age of installed turbines was six years old.
The importance of scheduled maintenance of wind turbines
This is a method to ensure that your wind turbines are kept in consistent working order. Wind technicians should do the following two to three times per year:
Lubricate the moving parts on components, such as gearboxes and bearings
Check connections on numerous devices within the system
Resolve any concerns that may develop
Dictate maintenance costs through long-term or short-term technicians on-site
You can crunch the numbers to see what would make the most sense for your project’s O&M costs by weighing whether it might be better to have permanent technicians on-site or whether you would only want them on-site on a short-term basis. Our technicians are available to perform the following services on your project across the country:
Performance decline is a reality of wind power fleets when wind turbines age, requiring more operations and maintenance (O&M) costs to manage acceptable output. HIS Markit recently released a report that indicated that U.S. wind O&M spending is expected to increase to above $7.5 billion by 2030 – which is a 50% increase from spending in 2018.
Wind energy maintenance
As with all machinery, turbines are also subjected to ageing and the need to be maintained to preserve optimal and efficient output. If capacity factors were to decrease to such an extent with age, it would mean that wind farms will subsequently produce a lower lifetime output and that the cost of electricity at those plants will increase. A dataset collected from wind turbines between 1998 and 2005 has shown that O&M costs climbed from $30/kW/yr when the machines were still new, exceeding $65/kW/yr when the turbines had been operational for 11 years. Importantly, with the advent of improvements in turbine technology, the starting costs between 2006 to 2011 were much less at approximately $24/kW/yr, indicating significant improvement in reliability and lower O&M costs.
Older turbines are likely to fail more frequently or take longer be brought back online, with reasons being that they might encounter more serious failures, components might be more difficult to source, and operators not being as likely to hold comprehensive maintenance contracts for the machines. Ultimately, the efficiency of a wind power fleet comes down to how much effort an owner is willing to invest in each machine to keep the O&M costs lower in the long run.
For scheduled maintenance or services of your commercial wind power projects, get in touch with our qualified team at ANEMOI are here to assist you. Our services include gearbox oil changes, scheduled maintenance, manpower augmentation, and retrofits.
Wind generated power was responsible for more than 7% of the United States’ national electricity in 2019, with this form of renewable energy continuing to gain popularity. While there doesn’t seem to be an industry standard on operation and maintenance (O&M) costs, it does, however, seem as if these costs will continue to decrease in the years to come.
Operation and maintenance costs
In 2009, the WindFacts publication found that O&M costs could account for up to 20-25% of the total levelized cost for each kWh produced by a new turbine during its lifetime. More than a decade later, however, these O&M costs are widely considered to be on a downward trajectory for onshore and offshore projects as larger machines are being used and wind turbines are becoming more reliable with the advancement of turbine technology. This, in turn, has triggered manufacturers to offer scheduled and unscheduled maintenance at lower costs than a few years ago.
These costs are, understandably, difficult to standardise as there are various factors to take into account which will differ from project to project, such as:
Turbine service contract
Unscheduled maintenance
Insurance
Land rent
Local taxes
Transmission charges
Electricity usage
From latest reports, it would seem that the bulk of O&M expenses are influenced by unscheduled breakdowns and the servicing of wind turbines – which can all be controlled by the wind farm owner to a certain extent. One thing’s for certain – the development of turbine technology continues to have a positive effect on O&M costs.
If you would like to see whether you could save any O&M costs on your wind generated power projects, get in touch with our qualified team at ANEMOI. Our services include gearbox oil changes, scheduled maintenance, manpower augmentation, and retrofits.
