Patent ID: 8924162

Claim:
A method for predicting an end of life of a wind turbine component wherein a computer processor executes a computer program encoded in a non-transitory computer readable medium containing instructions there for causing the computer processor to perform an operation of transforming electronic data into a prognostic evaluation, the method comprising: receiving environmental conditions indicative of natural surroundings of wind turbines within a wind turbine farm from environmental sensors; receiving component performance metrics indicative of an operation of wind turbines within a wind turbine farm from performance sensors; distributing the wind turbines into peer-clusters having less than a total number of wind turbines within the wind turbine farm such that the wind turbines within each of the peer-clusters have similar environmental conditions; identifying a highest performing wind turbine, a low performing wind turbine, and a subgroup of higher performing wind turbines within one of the peer-clusters based upon a predicted performance model; the computer processor processing the component performance metrics of the low performing wind turbine and the subgroup of higher performing wind turbines in the peer-cluster to extract fault condition indicators that correlate the component performance metrics to failure modes; identifying a critical component of the low performing wind turbine by contrasting the fault condition indicators of the low performing wind turbine with the subgroup of higher performing wind turbines in the peer-cluster; and predicting the end of life of the critical component of the low performing wind turbine based upon the component performance metrics of the subgroup of higher performing wind turbine in the peer-cluster.