Nicole Steele is a climate and clean energy policy leader with more than two decades of experience designing and implementing programs across federal, state, and local government, nonprofit institutions, and financial markets. She currently serves as Director of Climate Policy at Amalgamated Bank, where she works to strengthen policy environments and coordinate catalytic capital to support scalable clean energy deployment.
Nicole previously held senior roles at the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where she contributed to the design and implementation of nationally significant initiatives, including Solar for All and components of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. At DOE, she led the development of the Community Power Accelerator, a national market infrastructure and technical assistance platform aimed at addressing structural barriers to distributed clean energy deployment.
Earlier in her career, she founded and served as Executive Director of GRID Alternatives Mid-Atlantic, advancing equitable access to solar and workforce development. She has also worked to modernize state and local clean energy financing frameworks, contributing to the policy and governance structures that enabled programs such as DC’s Solar for All and the development of the DC Green Bank. Her work focuses on translating policy intent into durable market structures that enable long-term clean energy deployment.