Short and long-term reliability assessment of wind farms

Wind energy has been considered to be one of the main participants in supplying global energy needs. Meanwhile reliability and availability are critical issues to be studied with high wind penetration. While previous studies have focused on steady state behavior of wind turbines, this paper presents a Markovian method to study time-based reliability of wind farms. This method considers wind speed, failure and repair rates of wind turbines as well as load demands for short-term and long-term reliability calculation and comparison. Effect of change in initial number of working wind turbines and repair crew will also be investigated.