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This paper represents an expert view from Europe of future emerging technologies within the wind energy sector considering their potential, challenges, applications and technology readiness and how they might evolve in the coming years. These technologies were identified as originating primarily from the academic sector, some start-up companies and a few larger industrial entities. The following areas were considered: airborne wind energy, offshore floating concepts, smart rotors, wind-induced energy harvesting devices, blade tip-mounted rotors, unconventional power transmission systems, multi-rotor turbines, alternative support structures, modular high voltage direct current generators, innovative blade manufacturing techniques, diffuser-augmented turbines and small turbine technologies. The future role of advanced multiscale modelling and data availability is also considered. This expert review has highlighted that more research will be required to realise many of these emerging technologies. However, there is a need to identify synergies between fundamental and industrial research by correctly targeting public and private funding in these emerging technology areas as industrial development may outpace more fundamental research faster than anticipated. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/).

Wind energy is produced at random times, whereas the energy consumption pattern shows distinct demand peaks during day-time and low levels during the night. The use of a refrigerated warehouse as a giant battery for wind energy is a new possibility that is being studied for wind energy integration as well as a way to store electricity produced during night-time by wind turbines. The controller for load management in a refrigerated warehouse with wind power penetration by GA-based is introduced in this paper. The objective function is to minimize the energy consumption for operating the refrigerated warehouse. It can be seen that the GA-based control strategy achieves feasible results for operating the temperature in refrigerated warehouse. Balancing the wind power production with refrigerated warehouse load management promises to be a clean and cost effective method. For refrigerated warehouse owners, it has the potential to lower operational costs.