Reliability of Collection Grids for Large Offshore Wind Parks

Offshore wind parks (WPs) require huge investments and it is crucial to maximize the power produced by the park in order for the investment to pay back within reasonable time. Accessibility to the WP may be limited during certain periods of the year due to adverse weather conditions, which makes repair times very long. In this paper, availability of large offshore WPs is analyzed for three different topologies of collection grid within the WP. The energy not produced due to outages in the WP is calculated and sensitivity of the results to variations in failure rate and mean time to repair of cables and apparatus included is investigated