Galen Maclaurin is a senior energy researcher and the Group Manager of Geospatial Data Science at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, USA. His research evaluates the barriers and opportunities for national-scale deployment of new electricity generation and energy infrastructure from a cost-performance perspective. He leads a geospatial modeling team that develops innovative, scalable methods to analyze energy project siting and estimate the techno-economic potential of future energy additions, considering social, regulatory, and environmental factors. His team leads NREL’s Renewable Energy Potential (reV) model, which evaluates these considerations integrating spatiotemporal resource data and high-resolution land use, infrastructure, and environmental data. He also leads the development of meso-scale wind and solar resource data sets at the intersection of atmospheric science, machine learning, and big data processing. Prior to joining NREL in 2015, he served as a Geospatial Data Scientist in the Integrated Assessment Modeling group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). He has a PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado Boulder and has taught university courses internationally on energy deployment and geospatial modeling.
