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Deutsche Windtechnik doubles the availability Alpha Ventus turbines

By: Tom Russell 20/09/2022 Deutsche Windtechnik

General Windfarms

According to Deutsche Windtechnik, its maintenance work for the Adwen turbines at the Alpha Ventus offshore wind farm has proven to be a success.

The independent service provider claims that after it took over maintenance for six wind turbines at the beginning of 2020, the technical availability increased from the initial value of 42 percent (mainly caused due to a previous turbine crash and longer downtimes) to 77 percent in the years 2020/21.

Deutsche Windtechnik further noted that the upward trend is continuing in 2022 with a current availability of 94 percent. It revealed that the basis for this result was a consistently high proportion of remote fault elimination of about 50 percent as well as a range of measures to gradually optimise turbine operation. These measures were developed and implemented in close cooperation with the operator DOTI (Deutsche Offshore-Testfeld und Infrastruktur GmbH & Co. KG) and the operations manager Omexom Renewable Energies Offshore GmbH.

"Deutsche Windtechnik has made valuable improvements as an ISP and has proactively contributed to a significant increase in availability", said Dirk Warnecke, Managing Director of the operating company Deutsche Offshore-Testfeld und Infrastruktur GmbH & Co. KG (DOTI).

The scope of services provided by Deutsche Windtechnik for the alpha ventus offshore wind farm includes remote data monitoring, troubleshooting, scheduled maintenance for the turbines, maintenance of the systems, technical support and the storage of spare parts.

Deutsche Windtechnik stated that the early, transparent planning of maintenance and service operations as well as the consolidation of various service teams and competencies made it possible to halve the number of days for maintenance work from the original eight to ten in 2020 to four or five days in 2022. In addition, the safety concept was revised and the stock of spare parts was expanded.

"Together with DOTI and Omexon, we analysed, evaluated and prioritised the operating errors at the beginning of the contract and developed suitable solutions," said Jens Landwehr, Managing Director of Deutsche Windtechnik's offshore unit. For example, some redundancies of the turbines were exhausted, and there were problems with the inverter cooling and some of the pitch systems. "The step-by-step implementation of the measures, the improved operational planning and logistics as well as the excellent teamwork between our internal and field service enabled us to permanently correct the errors, and this is reflected in the high availability. The important thing now is to keep going and implement further optimisations, for example in the area of spare parts management and by eliminating further redundancies and developing more retrofits that increase availability. The turbines can clearly make an economic contribution to the energy transition, even though they were built in 2010."

Alpha Ventus was one of the first German offshore wind farms to be built. Since it entered operation in 2010, the project has produced enough electricity to meet annual consumption of around 71,000 average households (3,500 kWh) in Germany. The project is owned by EWE, RWE and Vattenfall.

For more information on offshore wind farms worldwide, click here.

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Deutsche Windtechnik doubles the availability Alpha Ventus turbines

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