NREL’s Greg Martin Helps Engineer Energy Integration Onto the Grid
Group Manager Named 2024 Distinguished Member of Operations Staff
In his early days at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Greg Martin worked in an unassumingoffice space. That was nearly 17 years ago, when he toiled without complaint in a converted garage without running water at NREL’s campus near Boulder, Colorado.
“I loved it because I was at the wind site with all of these crazy electronics things and electrolyzers, power electronics, big switches, and I just got to plow into that and hook stuff up, build it, upgrade it, set up experiments, run things,” Martin said. “I just really loved it because of the hands-on stuff, so I thrived doing that.”
Less hands-on these days, Martin now serves as group manager for the Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) research engineering team, where he has considerably more room. At 182,500 square feet, ESIF serves as the starting point for NREL researchers interested in connecting renewable energy technologies onto the grid.
“Now I do less engineering and a lot more strategy, tactics and processes, programs and people, which I like,” said Martin, 47, who holds degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Colorado-Boulder. “I really like the people in my group. They’re fantastic.”
The same could be said of Martin himself, who this year became among the inaugural members of NREL’s Distinguished Member of Operations Staff. The honor went to a baker’s dozen of staff for their expertise and impact to the laboratory. Martin was singled out “for exemplary leadership, technical acumen, strategic vision, and unwavering passion for mission-oriented collaboration.”
“To receive the award is just amazing,” Martin said. “It really helped reinforce the value of what we in operations do and strive to do toward the mission.”
As valued as Martin has become at NREL, he initially had trouble getting his foot in the door. Over the course of about 18 months, Martin applied to work at NREL five times.
“When I applied to NREL, I was just working on my master’s,” he said. “I didn’t even have a master’s.”
Martin grew up in Wisconsin, the oldest of two children. His father, a computer programmer who believed in working with his hands, passed that trait along to his only son. “He’d have me out in the middle of a Wisconsin winter, changing the oil in the car,” Martin recalled. “You can’t even move your fingers, but we got it done.”
Post college, Martin found his way to Washington state and a job at the aircraft manufacturer Boeing, which was then developing the 787 Dreamliner. A lighter weight plane because it was made of composite material, the task of analyzing the electrical load fell to Martin. He went around to the different departments working on the plane to find out how much power the flight controls, avionics, and other systems would need. The process took nearly a year, and Martin realized while more traditional planes allowed the wiring to be incorporated into their aluminum frame; with the composite material, the return current needed additional wiring. Adjustments had to be made.
Martin spent three and a half years at Boeing before returning to college, this time for grad school. He picked Colorado, where he had friends and family, and found himself interested in working at NREL. He had already come to the realization that “we have to do better as a society for future generations.
“I think working at Boeing was interesting and exciting,” he said, “but I think my core value drove me to want to try to participate in shifting that societal direction toward sustainable, renewable energy.”
Martin’s first posting at NREL was at what is now known as the Flatirons Campus, located outside Boulder and distinguishable by massive wind turbines visible for miles. In his converted garage space, Martin kept busy doing systems integration work. Any renewable energy or related technologies need to be successfully integrated into the electrical grid, so Martin and his colleagues had to solve any problems.
“The amount of work started increasing,” he said. “More and more projects started knocking at the door and getting funded.” By his fifth year at the facility, Martin started seeing an uptick in visitors interested in systems integration. His boss, Ben Kroposki, began pitching the idea that NREL needed a larger space for system integration work. That push eventually resulted in the decision to build ESIF at the South Table Mountain Campus outside Golden, Colorado. Martin served as a key player in the design and development of the facility, which opened in 2013.
“It was exciting to start working on design requirements for a new facility,” Martin said. “We transitioned a pretty significant chunk of our workday into working on ESIF. We were still keeping the rest of the things going to the extent we could.”
When ESIF opened, Martin relocated to the new building.
“There were only a few of us. There were only five or six people in the ESIF labs doing stuff, so it was kind of bare bones,” Martin said. “It started off pretty slow, but a few researchers would bring projects and come down and work with us in the labs. That’s just accelerated to the state we are today, which is full and very busy. Then, as the organization grew and evolved, there was opportunity within ESIF operations.”
Greg Martin and his wife Holly hike with their son and daughter near their Boulder home. Photo from Greg Martin, NREL
Martin has served in his current role for seven years. The days in the garage when a researcher with some technical ability could conduct a systems integration test are long gone.
“This stuff is way too big, complex, hazardous,” he said. “There's different controllers on everything, and safety procedures for interconnecting all these different things. It’s really the system integration research space that is closest to the application in the field. You have to have research engineering operations working with researchers in order to do it. Otherwise, it's not going to get done.”
He spends less time with hands-on projects these days as he supervises a team of 13 research engineers. He’s more hands on at home, where Martin is serving as general contractor to a massive home remodeling project. His spare time over the past 11 months has been taken up by a larger two-story home in South Boulder that Martin, his wife Holly, and their 11-year-old twins will move into when the work is finally complete.
“It's been a learning experience, for sure,” he said.
When not working at NREL or on his remodel project, Martin picks up a guitar and plays with his family. His wife, an algebra teacher to eighth graders at a charter school, sings and plays guitar and fiddle. Their daughter fiddles, while their son has moved on from banjo to bass. Martin prefers bluegrass.
“It's fun to listen to. It's accessible,” he said. “There's that tradition and that kind of folk thing where no matter who you're playing with, you can find some common song that you know, that really just helps get people together.”
Parallels could be drawn between Martin working at ESIF and picking out tunes on his guitar (or banjo, or mandolin, both of which he also plays). The two facets of his life, after all, involve systems integration.