Juan Torres

Juan Torres oversees NREL’s research on power systems engineering, cybersecurity, energy security and resilience, and decision science and systems analysis.

Torres is co-chair for the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE's) Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium, a partnership of 14 national laboratories to advance modernization of the U.S. power grid. He also co-leads the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) research platform. ARIES matches the scale and complexity of real energy systems to accelerate solutions for a clean energy future.

Torres has provided congressional testimony on several occasions. In 2021, he testified at a hearing on Lessons Learned from the Texas Blackouts: Research Needs for a Secure and Resilient Grid, called by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. In July 2019, he spoke before the committee’s Subcommittee on Energy about modernizing and securing our nation’s electricity grid. And in 2018, he provided testimony to the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on the topic of blackstart, the process of returning energy to the power grid after a systemwide blackout.

Prior to joining NREL in 2017, Torres served in a variety of technical and management positions throughout his 27-year career at Sandia National Laboratories, most recently as deputy to Sandia’s vice president for Energy and Climate programs. At Sandia, he led research efforts and vulnerability assessments in cybersecurity, guided research in advanced microgrid and renewable energy, and led the security and resilience team under the DOE's Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium efforts.

Torres co-led the establishment of the DOE National Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Test Bed to secure power grid control systems from cyberattack. He served as a member of the DOE task force that developed a national plan to secure the U.S. energy infrastructure in response to PDD-63 Critical Infrastructure Protection. He also served as Sandia’s engineering liaison to the Air Force Materiel Command at Peterson Air Force Base for development and deployment of mobile command and control systems in support of U.S. Space Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command missions.

Torres holds a bachelor's degree in electronics engineering technology from the University of Southern Colorado and a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of New Mexico. He has completed additional graduate work in management science and engineering at Stanford University.