Abstract
It is vital that the definition and measurement of performance of devices has a common basis internationally, and that an appropriate risk assessment is in place for the design. As the technologies demonstrate that they work and fulfil their design intent, it is necessary to raise funds to deploy devices to demonstrate reliability of performance and to start to run down the cost of energy produced. Reliability assessment has the following objectives: to ensure that an acceptable level of system reliability can be achieved; to quantify life‐cycle costs over the expected lifetime of the array; to plan operations and maintenance (O&M) strategies; and to identify design weaknesses for system improvement. A more detailed approach to assessing reliability is provided by physics of failure bottom‐up methods. Failure rates are required from a database that allows several reliability statistics to be calculated recursively up through different hierarchical levels.
This is a chapter from Wave and Tidal Energy.