Analysis of a onshore wind farm in India-for sustainable development

The rapid development of electricity generation by wind energy is eco-friendly and does not pollute the atmosphere unlike thermal power plant. In this paper, the status like performance, reliability and various problems of a wind farm which is located at Muppandal, southern part of India have been analysed. This wind farm has 15 numbers of wind turbine generators (WTGs) of each 400 kW capacity and its annual average generation was 1.4 x 10⁷ kWh. The performance status such as technical availability, real availability and capacity factor for this windfarm were 98.26 %, 83.06 % and 26.61 % respectively. The information from existing data of this wind farm was collected and reliability status like failure rate, mean time to failure, median, mode and reliability were calculated. In this paper an advanced Weibull technique was carried out for estimation of reliability and the reliability results are presented. The percentage of average stoppage time due to grid failure, low wind, electrical component failure, mechanical component failure and preventive maintenance are 13 %, 79 %, 2 %, 5 % and 1 % respectively. It also deals with Pareto analysis to classify the data and rank the categories of the failures in the descending order of their occurrences.