Renewable and non-renewable energy sit on either side of a sea-saw; the side with favourable economics and politics

wins. The oil embargo of 1973 dramatically aected Europes and North Americas energy situation; the jolt of price increases, supply cuts and energy insecurity was felt immediately. In reaction, private and public institutions invested in wind turbines. The 1978 National Energy Act, the Power plant and Industrial Fuel Use Act prohibited the construction of new electric generation facilities to be red by oil or gas. The inertia continues today, not only for political but for economical reasons as well. 1970s surge of wind turbine development is documented in the IEEE paper by K.T.Fung et al 1981. Among many broad challenges, K.T. Fung et al briey acknowledged the operation and maintenance challenge due to lack of accurate projections of component life limitations. The urgent nature of wind energy implementation is sensed which prioritized eorts on execution rather than asset management, operation and maintenance optimization. The purpose of this article is to review existing literature to identify a gap between industry practices and research recommended O&M.El-Thalji et al 2012 identied six areas of research: 1. maintenance optimization models 2. maintenance techniques 3. maintenance scheduling 4. maintenance performing measurements 5. maintenance information systems 6. maintenance policies El. Thalji et al. identied three main areas of academic research: 1. condition monitoring 2. diagnostic techniques 3. and prognostic techniques The academic research in these three is cross-dependent on various engineering disciplines and technologies. The concept of Dependability is promoted as a relationship between the inuencing factors of reliability, maintainability and/or maintenance support.

Wind turbine components

A wind turbine is a complex machine with mechanical, electrical and structural major components (listed in order of decreasing cost): 1. tower 2. blades 3. gearbox 4. generator/converter 5. bedplate 6. transformer 7. pitch system 8. hub 9. brake 10. yaw system

Wind turbine reliability

J. Perez et al. (2013) categorized the main wind turbine designs that have been in use since late 1990s and presented their component failure rates and downtime for various conditions across the world. J. Perez et al. ultimately show that wind turbine blades and gearbox tend to lead to the greatest downtimes. Slightly dierent remarks are made by F. Spinato et al. (2009); they investigated the reliability of 6000 modern onshore wind turbine in Denmark and Germany over 11 years. From their analysis it is shown that the electrical systems, blades, converter, generator, hydraulics and gearbox have the highest failure rates, in descending order. F. Spinato et al. (2009) also signied the reliability comparison between direct drive and gear box turbines. Direct drive turbines experience a higher failure rate but a lower downtime than the gear box turbine. F. Spinato et al. make no recommendation on operation or maintenance strategy.