With the increasing maturity of wind energy, designers, manufacturers and suppliers are putting more emphasis on lowering the operational costs over the total lifetime in order to improve the economics of wind energy projects. Especially the economics of offshore wind parks will become sensitive to the failure behaviour of the turbines. An adequate maintenance program in addition to a reliable design is very crucial for the economics of future wind energy projects.To develop such a maintenance program, it is necessary to have a clear understanding of the actual failure behaviour of the turbines and equipment in a wind park. The Netherlands Energy Research Foundation ECN and Baas and Roost Maintenance Consult BV have carried out a project entitled 'Development of a Maintenance Information System for Wind Turbines' in which a system has been developed, called the 'Maintenance Managers', to collect and analyse failure and maintenance data of large wind turbine populations. This report briefly discusses the necessity of controlling maintenance for future large wind energy projects and the role of maintenance and failure data. Furthermore, the report contains a description of the project, including its background, objectives, and scope. Most emphasis is put on the results of the project, viz. the demonstration version of the Maintenance Manager. The Maintenance Manager was programmed based on specifications drawn up in close co- operation with Lagerwey the WindMaster BV and other wind turbine manufacturers. In addition to the most commonly used maintenance management system for planning day-to-day maintenance work, this system is equipped with some unique features, viz. a FMECA module, and a strong analysis tool for ranking, trend analysis, statistical analysis, and detailed component investigation. These unique features offer wind turbine manufacturers the possibility to obtain maximal feedback from their failure and maintenance data with minimum effort. 18 refs.
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