Wind Turbine Reliability: A Brief Review

Abstract

Energy plays an important part in the economic growth and the socio-economic evelopment. With the increasing global energy demand and the depletion of fossil fuels renewable energy like wind energy have become not only an important source of clean energy but also important of a nation’s energy security. The wind turbine industry as a result is rapid developing with a global capacity of approximately 230 GW and is expected to increase five times by 2020. As this industry is becoming more commercial manufacturers are incorporating technologies from other fields which are proven into the wind turbines. However, these technologies are sometimes not appropriate for the wind turbines, which then lead to high failure rate. Despite this issue there exits only a number of many studies on the reliability on the wind turbines. Hence, this paper aim is to provide a review on wind turbine and its sub-components reliability, providing an overview of components failure rate and downtimes.