Offshore wind turbines availability is an important issue if such wind farms are to be considered a reliable source of renewable energy for the future. Environmental conditions and the low accessibility of such wind farms have contributed to the decrease of the availability of the wind turbines, compared to the onshore ones. In order to improve the reliability, condition monitoring systems and the implementation of scheduled maintenance strategies are a must for offshore power plants. This paper proposes a method of computing efficient electrical indicators using the available three-phase electrical quantities. These indicators are then to be used to obtain fault indicators for fault detection and diagnosis. The electrical indicators are obtained by using the instantaneous symmetrical components decomposition, a well proven method in power networks design and diagnosis. The new quantities are able to fully describe the whole electrical system and provide an effective mean to quantify the balance and unbalance in the system. The method uses the electrical three-phase quantities measured at the output of the generator in a wind turbine to obtain the indicators. The performance of this method is illustrated using both synthetic and experimental data.
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