60 years of typhoon-induced impacts on offshore wind farms: A holistic high-resolution evaluation of resilience

Offshore wind power is crucial for achieving carbon neutrality in East Asia and North America. However, these regions are prone to tropical cyclones, raising concerns about their resilience against such persistent threats. While previous work has focused on turbine fragility and single-event resilience, system-level wind farm resilience under multi-decadal climate considering cyclone-induced damage and maintenance interruption, stochastic component degradation and actual repair constraints remains largely unexplored. Here, we investigate multi-decadal offshore wind farm resilience under these interrelated factors using a proposed component-level, full-year, hourly failure-and-repair simulation model, and adopting reliable tropical cyclone, oceanographic, wind farm, maintenance parameterization, failure rate and repair time data. Wind farm-specific historical and expected cyclone conditions are constructed using a real-world data-calibrated Holland model. A turbine blade fragility curve is compiled based on previous studies. A two-parameter Weibull distribution component degradation model is adapted to directly adopt real-world failure rate data. We take the 54-GW planned offshore wind farms in South China as a case study given its substantial risk due to large capacity and frequent tropical cyclones. Results show that historical tropical cyclones could reduce annual wind farm availability by up to ∼14 percentage points and induce a long-term declining trend. Excluding structural damage, maintenance interruptions alone under expected tropical cyclones with return periods exceeding the turbine design lifetime still lead to substantial availability losses. Our work provides a holistic framework for quantifying tropical cyclone risks, reveals their substantial and intensifying impacts, and brings attention to the considerable but often overlooked threat from maintenance interruptions.