This paper reports the findings from the 2016 Wind Energy Research Workshop held in Lowell, MA. The workshop examined the state-of-the-art in wind energy research within the following three core topic areas: (A) Wind Turbine Design and Manufacturing including: blades, towers/foundations and nacelle, (B) Wind Farm Development including: offshore installations/siting, flow characterization and loads/waves/wind characterization, and (C) Wind Farm Operations including: controls, power production, wind farms, sensing, diagnostics, testing, structural health monitoring, reliability, energy storage, the grid and power transmission. Research challenges and future directions were discussed and are reported for each sub-topic area.

Introduction

Wind energy is one of the fastest growing sources of new electricity generation capacity in the United States of America [1]. As wind energy continues to grow towards the U.S. goal of achieving 20% electricity generation from wind energy by 2030 [2] , new challenges and opportunities have arisen due to: the growing competitiveness of the industry [3], the intermittency of wind energy production [4-6], operations and maintenance [7-9] as well as power distribution and grid integration related considerations [10-12]. These challenges are being addressed in part by more advanced design and control [13, 14], deployment, and condition monitoring [15, 16] in addition to more robust power electronics [17], grid transmission and advanced energy storage infrastructure [18-21]. More specifically, these topics include research into larger wind turbines [22, 23], improvement of wind farm layout [24], examination of offshore wind installations [25], improved wind/wave load predictions [26], novel approaches to wind turbine and wind farm control [13, 14, 27, 28], as well as improved sensing and monitoring of wind turbines [15, 16]. Ultimately, these 85 efforts are directed at improving wind energy responsiveness and applicability in the modern 86 energy landscape. This paper presents the findings of a two-day Wind Energy Research Workshop held in Lowell, Massachusetts on 15th-16th March 2016. The goal of the workshop was to bring together a diverse audience comprising academic, industry and government stakeholders to summarize current state of the art, understand current trends and define the future directions and opportunities in wind energy research. Experts, practitioners and participants were invited from around the world and