Abstract
This paper presents an improved approach to assess wind turbine reliability considering the impact of hub levels using Monte Carlo simulation. The hub level of wind turbine affects wind turbine reliability in two aspects: 1) different hub levels are subject to different wind speeds, which produce different wind power outputs; 2) due to the correlation between wind speeds and turbine failure rates, wind turbines with different hub levels have different rates of failure. Therefore, it is important to consider the wind turbine's height, particular hub levels, when evaluating wind turbine reliability. The purpose of this paper is to develop a model to evaluate wind farm reliability while considering the effect of hub levels on wind turbine output and on wind turbine failure rates. The proposed approach is tested on the IEEE RTS-79 system with relevant modifications using probabilistic simulation. The efficacy of the approach is verified by evaluating reliability indexes of wind farms when the hub levels of wind turbines are taken into account.