Availability warranty

Most full-service agreements include a warranted availability figure, commonly in the high nineties, with compensation payable if the supplier falls short. It is the central commercial mechanism aligning a manufacturer's service organization with an owner's production interest.

The exclusions are where the value of the guarantee is actually decided. Grid outages, curtailment, extreme weather beyond defined limits, force majeure, and scheduled maintenance windows are typically carved out, and the treatment of consequential delays such as crane or vessel waiting time varies enormously between contracts. Two agreements quoting the same percentage can transfer very different amounts of risk.

The structural limitation is that a time-based warranty pays on hours rather than on energy. A supplier meeting its target while machines run degraded has satisfied the contract and cost the owner production, because a turbine that is available and underperforming counts as available for every hour it runs.

This is why owners increasingly verify warranted performance against their own operating record rather than against supplier reporting. Independent measurement built from the fleet's own data is what turns an availability conversation into a production conversation, and it is a standard requirement in operations and maintenance contract renegotiation.