Resource and Project Energy Assessment 2018

Anna Craig
Director's Fellow
National Renewable Energy Laboratory


My career path has been defined by two themes: an insatiable curiosity which never stops asking "why" and an aspiration to contribute to restoring the natural world while building a socially conscious global community. It is little surprise, therefore, that I have spent the last eight years working in wind energy research. For my undergraduate thesis at Caltech, I performed CFD simulations of flows around single and paired vertical axis turbines and developed low-order numerical models for the mean flows, allowing optimization of turbine placement within arrays. During my graduate thesis at Stanford, I designed, executed, and analyzed large-scale, open-ended laboratory experiments to examine fluid kinematics and energy transfer within large arrays of model vertical axis wind turbines. My most recent research as a Director's Fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has been focused on understanding and quantifying the uncertainties within the energy estimation process for wind plants in order to develop statistically significant, data-driven insights. Developing new understandings through rigorous data analysis is thrilling to me, while the natural world is my passion.

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