08/20/2025

Academic Focus: Akshaya Jha

USAEE NEWSLETTER | SUMMER 2025

Akshaya Jha is an associate professor of economics and public policy at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. Jha’s research lies at the intersection of energy and environmental economics and industrial organization. He combines economic modeling with causal inference to quantify the economic and environmental impacts of policies affecting wholesale electricity supply. Recent papers examine financial trading in California’s wholesale electricity market, the phase-out of nuclear power in Germany, the rapid growth of rooftop solar in Western Australia, and the link between wholesale procurement costs and electricity blackouts in India.

In work in progress, Jha and coauthors study the factors driving where large-scale batteries are built in Texas’s wholesale electricity market. Early battery projects mainly earned money by providing frequency regulation, voltage control, and other ancillary services. In recent years, however, these ancillary services markets have become more competitive, and batteries are increasingly earning revenue from the intertemporal arbitrage of energy prices. This shift—along with the expected surge in electricity demand from data centers and other large new users—has implications for where battery storage will be most profitable and for the transmission upgrades needed to support wind, solar, and growing demand.

In another ongoing project with Professor Ron Chan, Jha is building a spatial general equilibrium model to quantify how placing wind and solar resources in different U.S. counties affects prices, electricity use, migration of households and firms, and trade in other goods. Because wind and solar have near-zero short-run operating costs, adding them increases supply and generally lowers wholesale electricity prices. Lower prices, in turn, can lead to higher electricity consumption, shifts in where people and firms choose to locate, and changes in other parts of the economy—effects economists call “general equilibrium” impacts. The model will capture these broader effects while accounting for both physical transmission congestion constraints and the gap between wholesale and retail electricity prices.

Jha received a BS in Economics and Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in Economics from Stanford University.