TECHNICAL EVALUATION OF WIND ENERGY FARMS

Abstract

In India, the wind power generation has gained a high level of attention and acceptability compared to other renewable energy technologies. India has a good potential of wind throughout the country. Winds in India are influenced by the strong south-west summer monsoon, which starts in May—June. According to initial estimates, the wind power potential in India was assessed as around 20,000MW. It has been re-assessed as 45,195MW. The present exploitable technical potential is limited to 12,875MW, on account of the limitation of grid capacity in the state grids. The technical potential will go up with the augmentation of grid capacity in the potential states. This means that lack of infrastructure the main constraint to exploit the available wind energy in India. The present study has been carried out to compare the existing maintenance schedule with the failure trend observed in the wind farm and to recommend some changes if found necessary after analyzing the data collected so that the operation of the wind farm can be smoothened which can be achieved by providing proper maintenance of the components causing more energy loss. The study was carried out by conducting primary survey of the project area. The technical details of the wind turbine systems were collected from one of the typical wind farm located at Sangli in Maharashtra. The data which was required to analyse the failure trend of the wind farm components for the past three years was obtained through some of the records of the wind farm and through discussions with the maintenance personnel. iii After analyzing the data it was found that the failure trend is uniform and proper attention should be focused during the scheduled maintenance activities for transformer, pitch clutch brake and the control systems as they are the major contributors of the system downtime.