Kate Anderson is the Chief of Staff for Energy Systems Integration (ESI) at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). In this role, Kate supports operations and strategic planning activities focused on power systems, energy security and resilience, systems analysis, and decision science. She coordinates energy justice activities across NREL, developing strategies to imbed equity in all phases of NREL’s work from research through deployment.
Prior to this role, Kate was a Senior Engineer and Manager of the NREL Modeling and Analysis Group for thirteen years. Her team developed tools and provided techno-economic modeling and analysis to support energy deployment decisions for federal, state, and local governments, tribes, universities, and industry partners. Anderson served as the program lead for the development of NREL’s REopt model, employed by over 50,000 users to evaluate cost-optimal selection and sizing of energy systems and inform clean energy deployment worldwide. She also led research on quantifying the value of resilience and incorporating this value into investment decisions.
In 2019, she was an R&D 100 Award nominee for REopt Lite, and in 2021, she was recognized by the U.S. Clean Energy Education & Empowerment (C3E) Initiative with the Social, Economic, & Policy Innovation Award. In 2022, she was a DOE Oppenheimer fellow. Prior to joining NREL, Anderson launched satellites as a captain in the U.S. Air Force. She has a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from MIT, an M.B.A. in Management of Technology from the University of New Mexico, an M.S. in Renewable Energy Science and Technology from Loughborough University, and a Ph.D. in Advanced Energy Systems from Colorado School of Mines.