Reference cases for verification of operation and maintenance simulation models for offshore wind farms

Due to lack of operating experience in the field of offshore wind energy and large costs associated with maintaining offshore wind farms, there is a need to develop accurate operation and maintenance models for strategic planning purposes. This paper provides an approach for verifying such simulation models and demonstrates it by describing the verification process for four models. A reference offshore wind farm is defined and simulated using these models to provide test cases and benchmark results for verification for wind farm availability and O&M costs. This paper also identifies key modelling assumptions that impact the results. The calculated availabilities for the four models show good agreement apart from cases where maintenance resources are heavily constrained. There are also larger discrepancies between the cost results. All the differences in the results can be explained by different modelling assumptions. Therefore, the models can be regarded as verified based on the presented approach.