Gaurav Doshi, assistant professor in applied economics and a faculty affiliate of the Georgia Tech Energy Policy and Innovation Center researches, among other topics, ways to make the benefits of large electrification projects more transparent.

It’s a chicken and egg situation: Should renewable energy projects launch first hoping that transmission lines to pipe generated power to distant places will follow on their heels? Or should the transmission lines be stood up first as a way to attract investments in renewable energy projects? Which comes before the other? It’s a question that has intrigued Gaurav Doshi, assistant professor at the School of Economics at Georgia Tech, for a while now. His award-winning paper about this research explores the downstream effects of building power lines.

After a bachelor’s and master’s degree in applied economics from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, Doshi earned his doctorate in the same field from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2023. He explored questions about environmental economics as part of his doctoral work.

“Once I started researching energy markets in the U.S., I kept getting deeper and coming up with new questions,” Doshi says. Among the many his work explores: What are the effects of infrastructure policies and how can they help decarbonization efforts? What are some of the unintended consequences policy makers need to think about?

One of his current research projects has roots in his doctoral work. It explores how to quantify the benefits of difficult-to-quantify environmental infrastructure projects. Case in point: Decarbonization will likely lead to more electrification from renewable energy resources and will need power lines to transport this energy to places of demand. The costs for such infrastructure are pretty transparent as part of government project funding. But the benefits are less so, Doshi points out. To develop effective policy, both the costs and benefits need clear visibility. “Otherwise the question arises ‘why should we spend billions of dollars of taxpayer money if we don’t know the benefits?’”

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