Puneet Chitkara

Puneet Chitkara has over 20 years of consulting experience in the power and utilities space. He is an electrical engineer with Ph.D. in Development Economics. Recently, Puneet completed a post-doctoral fellowship at The Johns Hopkins University. He developed optimization models for studying the impact of institutional, and regulatory constraints on the costs of power system operations, emissions, and curtailment of renewable energy generation. Before this, Puneet also did a Post-Doctoral fellowship at The University of Hong Kong, where he worked on game theoretic models for the energy sector.

Puneet has worked on the development and deployment of network pricing, short and long-term portfolio optimization, and capacity expansion planning for various entities in the electricity supply industry, multilateral and bilateral funding agencies (World Bank, USAID, FCDO), regulatory bodies, private equity investors, and government planning agencies. These models have been used for several purposes including planning, investment decisions, development of green pathways, network pricing, carbon-free power procurement solutions for commercial and industrial consumers, and in actual power systems and business operations. The expansion planning models developed by Puneet have been used to help utilities plan transmission, storage, and generation assets and also estimate the differences in revenue streams that these assets generate based on their location in the grid.

Beyond energy system models, Puneet also developed Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model for KPMG India. CGE models are top-down models and study the impact of policy interventions or technological change - such as replacing fossil fuels with hydrogen or other fuels (done for the World Bank), introduction of electric vehicles, renewable energy generation targets, etc on the Economy (for the World Resources Institute) (e.g., GDP, Fiscal Deficit, Employment, etc), and Energy Security.

Puneet has several publications in refereed international journals including IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Empirical Economics, Review of Development Economics, Applied Energy, Environmental Science, and Technology, International Journal of Electric Power and Energy Systems, IEEE Access, and Applied Economics Letters.