Dr. Archana Ghodeswar completed her Ph.D. in Economics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The title of her Ph.D. thesis is “Essays on Environmental, Fiscal, and Demand-Side Policies in Electricity Markets.” Archana is an energy economist with expertise in energy and environmental policies. Archana received her master’s in electrical power systems from India in 2011. Before joining the Ph.D. program in the US, Archana worked in a large Indian electric utility for several years, where she served as an engineer in the transmission and distribution of power. In addition to her expertise in demand-side management and energy efficiency improvements, she has considerable power plant knowledge.
Archana is a Certified Energy Manager (CEM) who has the capability to optimize the energy performance of a facility, building, or industrial plant. She helps to develop and implement organizations’ energy management strategies. She helped several counties in their building energy audits of school buildings.
“India Power Award 2014” for ‘Best Woman’s Contribution to the power sector’ is one of Archana’s major achievements. In India, she served as an executive engineer for a district with more than 100,000 electricity consumers. She played an active role in rural electrification, designing and implementing the ring-main system for the district, converting the distribution system from an overhead line to underground cable in the town, and resolving issues related to prosumers.
Currently, Archana working on the Affordability Modelling by county for the high growth, high-energy Data Centers’ installation. She performs economic impact analyses of new investments using IO model and CGE modeling. Archana performs economic modeling for quantifying energy and nonenergy benefits, and evaluation of weatherization assistance program (WAP). She has created educational resources under the FEMP and E2C program. She has also created Excel-based return on investment (ROI) tool for residential solar power for Tama county (IA) and building energy audit for several other counties in Tennessee under energy to community (E2C) program. Archana is a team member and ORNL lead with other multi labs performing analyses on distributional impacts of Integrated Energy Futures (IEF). She has done systematic review for monetizing the resiliency value for microgrids/CHP in the DOE’s CHP Deployment Program. She has also contributed to the OECD project on energy and environmental justice in the clean energy transition.
Recently, she received best paper award for the “Technoeconomic analysis of geothermal energy storage: European benchmarks and U.S. opportunities”. She performs technoeconomic analysis (TEA) for sustainable biocomposite materials from saltwater algae, CO2 from direct air capture and other emerging technologies.
Archana brings a unique skill set to her work, with a background in economics, statistics and electrical engineering. Her research interests include macroeconomics, energy and environmental economics, power systems, sustainable energy systems, and public policy.