Engineering practice has shown that early faults of gearboxes are a leading maintenance cost driver that can easily lower the profit from a wind turbine operation.A novel oil-lubricated electrostatic monitoring of wear debris for a wind turbine gearbox is presented.The continuous wavelet transform (CWT) is used to eliminate the noises of the original electrostatic signal.The kurtosis and root mean square (RMS) values of the time domain signal are extracted as the characteristic parameters to reflect the deterioration of the gearbox.The overall tendency of electrostatic signals in accelerated life test is analyzed.In the eighth cycle,the abnormal wear in the wind turbine gearbox is detected by electrostatic monitoring.A comparison with the popular MetalScan monitoring is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the electrostatic monitoring method.The results demonstrate that the electrostatic monitoring method can detect the fault accurately.