Evaluation of Overall Effectiveness Measurements in a wind farm: An approach to assess life cycle system effectiveness

This paper describes current Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) figures and evaluates the practices of performance measurement within Nordic wind farms. A traditional OEE approach is utilised to describe the current performance measures of wind farms in Nordic context, however, it lacks to evaluate the healthiness and health losses (i.e. losses due to faster deterioration rate compared to expected design rating) beside the availability, performance and quality losses. For instance, when a wind turbine deteriorates before the expected lifetime it is extremely significant to show through the utilisation figures high values of availability, performance and quality within that time interval. This approach has been applied based on actual data from two selected wind farms. Results show that health losses due to electricity generation under harsh loading and operating condition has the largest share of total operational losses which do not include health losses due to the assumption of the deterioration equality (i.e. in each year) and the satisfaction of design rating (i.e. expected lifetime rating). The life cycle approach for OEE highlights the value of asset together with its production effectiveness.