Review and quantification of major risks in wind farm development and operation

Abstract. With declining subsidies and tightening project margins, wind energy investments are increasingly exposed to a wide range of technical, operational, market, and system-level risks. Understanding the combined economic and technical relevance of these risks, and how they interact across project lifecycle phases, is essential for translating them into economic impact metrics. This study combines expert elicitation, structured survey results, and targeted literature review to identify and categorize the major risks affecting wind energy projects during both development and operation. These risks are clustered into four overarching sector challenges spanning long-term asset viability, component reliability, operation and maintenance performance, and rapid technology upscaling. To illustrate the potential economic relevance of these challenges, simplified scenario-based techno-economic impact assessments are conducted using a representative offshore wind farm case study. The analysis offers order-of-magnitude insights into how different risk categories propagate into economic performance indicators such as net present value and levelized cost of energy. The results demonstrate that different risks exhibit different economic signatures, including asymmetric downside risk, long-tailed loss distributions. Overall, this work does not propose a complete solution for capturing the full complexity of wind energy risks. Instead, it demonstrates the limitations of fragmented risk treatment and motivates the need for integrated, de-risking and decision-support frameworks capable of addressing interacting uncertainties. The study provides a structured starting point for future research aimed at developing such tools and supporting more robust investment, design, and operational decisions in the wind energy sector.