2017 wasn’t a great year for the wind turbines

Additional Reasons!

Abstract
Ageing is a fact of life. Just as with conventional forms of power generation, the energy produced by a wind farm gradually decreases over its lifetime, perhaps due to falling availability, aerodynamic performance or conversion efficiency. Understanding these factors is however complicated by the highly variable availability of the wind.

This paper reveals the rate of ageing of a national fleet of wind turbines using free public data for the actual and theoretical ideal load factors from the UK's 282 wind farms. Actual load factors are recorded monthly for the period of 2002–2012, covering 1686 farm-years of operation. Ideal load factors are derived from a high resolution wind resource assessment made using NASA data to estimate the hourly wind speed at the location and hub height of each wind farm, accounting for the particular models of turbine installed.

By accounting for individual site conditions we confirm that load factors do decline with age, at a similar rate to other rotating machinery. Wind turbines are found to lose 1.6 ± 0.2% of their output per year, with average load factors declining from 28.5% when new to 21% at age 19. This trend is consistent for different generations of turbine design and individual wind farms. This level of degradation reduces a wind farm's output by 12% over a twenty year lifetime, increasing the levelised cost of electricity by 9%.

1. Introduction
Ageing is a fact of life. Its effects are inevitable for all kinds of machinery, reducing the efficiency, output and availability of steam and gas turbines, solar PV modules, batteries and automobiles alike. Previous work on wind turbines has considered the reliability of individual components and the effect of ageing on availability, but any impact on the energy production of turbines or farms has not been widely reported.

If load factors (also known as capacity factors) decrease significantly with age, wind farms will produce a lower cumulative lifetime output, increasing the levelised cost of electricity from the plants. If the rate of degradation were too great, it could become worthwhile to prematurely replace the turbines with new models, implying that the economic life of the turbine was shorter than its technical life, further increasing its cost.

This could have significant policy implications for the desirability of investing in wind power, as argued in a recent report by Hughes for the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) [1]. That report suggested that the load factors of wind farms in the UK have declined by 5–13% per year, normalising for month-by-month variations in wind speeds. These findings could represent a significant hurdle for the wind industry, but they require replication.

Several factors can confound the relationship between age and observed output in a fleet of wind farms, given that a turbine's output is dependent on wind speeds at its site and the efficiency with which it captures the energy in that wind. For example, if wind speeds have fallen slightly over time, farms would have lower load factors in recent months, when they were at their oldest, giving a spurious correlation between age and poor performance. If improvements in design increase a turbine's output relative to capacity (its power coefficient) then newer turbines (of the improved design) will have higher load factors than old turbines, so that turbine output appears to decline with age, when really it improves with newer generations. On the other hand, if the best (windiest) sites were occupied first, then old farms could have higher load factors than new ones built on inferior sites, so that turbines would appear to improve with age.