Expertise

Topics:  Energy, Solar Energy, Wholesale Electricity Supply, Environmental Economics, Industrial Organization, Economic Modeling, Nuclear Power, Blackouts

Industries: Energy, Education/Learning

Jha’s research interests lie at the intersection of energy and environmental economics and industrial organization. His research uses a combination of economic modeling and causal inference techniques to quantify the economic and environmental costs and benefits of a wide range of policies impacting wholesale electricity supply. In recent work, he has examined the introduction of financial trading to California’s wholesale electricity market, the phase-out of nuclear power in Germany, the dramatic growth of rooftop solar capacity in Western Australia, and the determinants of electricity blackouts in India.

Media Experience

By 2025, coal will no longer be the main way to generate the world’s electricity  — Marketplace
And legislation passed this year in Congress could accelerate those trends even more, said Akshaya Jha at Carnegie Mellon University. “So the Inflation Reduction Act has the potential to bring, bring that sort of innovation for other products that we currently don’t think of as being cost effective,” Jha said.

US embassies may have accidentally improved air quality  — Ars Technica
Something unexpected happened in each of the cities in which the monitors appeared. Researchers found that, overall, air quality improved in the cities where embassies were tweeting out air-quality data. “We were surprised,” Akshaya Jha, assistant professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the paper’s authors, told Ars.

Real-time air quality monitoring can save lives  — Earth.com
“Poor air quality is a leading cause of premature death worldwide, responsible for one out of every nine deaths,” said study lead author Akshaya Jha, an assistant professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon. “Sharing credible air quality information can highlight this issue and have huge health and economic benefits that far outweigh the costs of the monitoring technology.”

Is Putin's War Pushing World Toward Nuclear Energy?  — Newsweek
Assistant professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University Akshaya Jha, who co-authored a paper on Germany's shift away from nuclear energy, told Newsweek that the question might not be one of economic viability, but of political will. And that paradigm shift, he added, is likely still a long time coming, going hand-in-hand with the broader adoption of other renewable energy sources.

How real-time data can curb air pollution and save more lives  — The Mandarin
One of the study co-authors, Dr Akshaya Jha from Carnegie Mellon University, said poor air quality was a leading cause of premature death worldwide, being responsible for one out of every nine deaths.