An Analytical Approach to Evaluate the Reliability of Offshore Wind Power Plants Considering Environmental Impact

The accurate quantitative reliability evaluation of off-shore wind power plants (OWPPs) is an important part in planning and helps to obtain economic optimization. However, loop structures in collector systems and large quantities of components with correlated failures caused by shared ambient influences are significant challenges in the reliability evaluation. This paper proposes an ana-lytical approach to evaluate the reliability of OWPPs considering environmental impact on failures and solve the challenges by protection zone models, equivalent power unit models and common cause failure (CCF) analysis. Based on investigation of the characteristics of OWPP and related failures mechanisms, the components are divided into three CCF subsets. With the aid of the protection zone model and equivalent power unit model merged with CCF, the faulty collector system state eval-uation is applied to reduce the computational burden. The case studies present the necessity and improved per-formance of merging CCF analysis into modeling via the comparison with other two simplified methods. A sensi-tivity analysis is also carried out to account for inaccu-racy of failure data. The results show that the assump-tion of independent failures in the conventional method might lead to over-optimistic or over-pessimistic evalua-tion depending on the CCF style.