SPARTA is an offshore wind farm performance benchmarking tool, run by industry for industry. Standing for ‘System Performance, Availability and Reliability Trend Analysis’, this tool allows owner/operators of offshore wind farms to compare key performance indicators (KPIs) for their farms to aggregated and anonymised benchmarks.
This report is split into 4 main sections:
1. The Year in Review
The report gives highlights of benchmarks from the 2020/21 financial year, showing the trends of metrics such as capacity factor, production-based availability and turbine transfers. The year is compared to previous years in order to evaluate how the industry is changing.
2. Did COVID-19 Impact Offshore Wind?
Performance metrics are analysed in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly examining the possible effects of social distancing on maintenance operations.
3. Forced Outages and Major Repairs
The review breaks down metrics supplied by the SPARTA group relating to forced outages and major repairs. Showing the failure rates for various outage types and components, the review looks at some of the factors related to failure rates.
4. Technology and Performance
As WTG technology continues to develop, the performance of assets is changing. In a final section, the review examines the performance of different generations of turbine, including a comparison of direct drive and gearbox turbines.