Wind Turbine Turbulence?

The customers for the wind turbines you are talking about are utilities or an operations company - not a retail customer. The OP phrased the point in a funny manner.

These people are only concerned with availability - not much money in a mW not generated. If someone has to climb a 100 or 150 meter tower to inspect a turbine it will happen rarely. If remote monitoring is available, of course it will be attractive. You would have computer monitoring of all critical parameters - vibration readings etc.

Better to do PM rather than have random failures.

Russ

Advocating extensive use of condition monitoring to predict faults fails to take into account the current state of development of monitoring equipment.

On existing offshore wind farms about 45% of service visits are the result of false positive readings or sensor breakdowns. Until the sensors are both more accurate and more robust, there will be no economic case for deploying them.

The correct way to tackle the problem is to make the equipment more reliable so that it doesn't breakdown, not to monitor when it is about to breakdown. Treat the disease not the symptoms.

James