Virya (वीर्य) is Sanskrit for vigour, courage and the inner strength to act — THE ENERGY IN YOU.

Anshul Saxena

Energy Markets & Power Systems

  • San Francisco Bay Area
  • English · Hindi

Professional summary

I am an avid learner and traveler. My interest is in “How Things Work” and “How We Can Make Them Work Better.” My work sits at the intersection of energy markets, power systems planning and policy — from production cost modeling and transmission planning to capacity markets, regulatory proceedings and the clean energy transition. I write about the shifts reshaping global energy markets, and I build tools (games, indexes and policy digests) that make this complex domain legible to a wider audience.

Selected writing

All writing

Games

Play the Energy Economy

Six browser games that teach real market mechanics the fun way. Trade power, trade futures, run datacenters, govern nations, build the BRICS bloc and test your knowledge, all priced in Virya Rupees (V₹). Five have global leaderboards; BRICS keeps its scoreboard on your device.

  • VIRYA: Power Trader

    Trade electricity like a pro.

    Trade electricity on a wholesale power desk against shifting demand, weather, outages and mythology-inspired rivals; overexposure gets margin-called.

    Trade Now: Power Trader (opens in a new tab)
  • VIRYA: Arthashastra

    Govern a nation. Win on quality of life.

    Choose one of seven ideologies and govern a nation for a decade of trade, summits, bonds and sanctions, scored on your citizens’ Quality of Life.

    Found Your Nation: Arthashastra (opens in a new tab)
  • VIRYA: Energy Futures

    Trade the curve. Survive the margin call.

    Run a country’s trading desk across crude, gas, power, LNG, carbon and uranium, solo or with up to five friends, on real margin and mark-to-market arithmetic.

    Open the Desk: Energy Futures (opens in a new tab)
  • VIRYA: BRICS

    Build the bloc. Keep your promises.

    Lead a founding BRICS seat through twelve rounds and three summits: charter regions, build projects and keep your promises to lead the bloc.

    Take Your Seat: BRICS (opens in a new tab)

About the six games

Energy Policy

Energy Policy, Decoded

Energy policy moves markets, but it lives in thousand-page dockets that nobody has time to read. The Virya Energy Policy Brief turns them into one-page briefs, each placed on its own jurisdiction's path from proposal to binding law, with the numbers that matter, who gains and who pays, the dates that will change it, and a link to the controlling official text.

  • 127policy briefs
  • 49countries
  • 10 yearsof policies covered
Read the Brief (opens in a new tab) How the brief works
  • One page per policy: the problem it attacks, the mechanism, the market effect and the key numbers
  • Sixty-four stage ladders show how far each policy is from becoming binding law, comparable across 49 countries in the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific
  • Ask the brief: a plain-language assistant grounded in the official text, with your own OpenRouter key

Virya Electric Grid Index

Is the grid ready for the AI decade?

The Virya Electric Grid Index benchmarks 86 economies on the strength of their power systems. Every country gets a rank, a pillar-by-pillar grade, a country-specific read on where it is at risk and why, and its resource mix, demand and regulatory set-up, all inside an interactive Energy Atlas that also maps the regulators, system operators and data sources for every market. The grid is the economy's balance sheet, and this index reads it.

  • 86economies benchmarked
  • 8scoring pillars
Explore the Index (opens in a new tab) How the index works
  1. Network losses and reliability
  2. Supply flexibility
  3. Component supply chains
  4. Cost of capital
  5. Economic growth
  6. Manufacturing momentum
  7. Regulatory resilience
  8. Equipment capability

Each economy is graded Good, Fair, or Risky on all eight; its rank comes from the underlying pillar scores, so economies with the same grades can rank differently.

Virya Compute Risk Explorer

What does a GPU-hour really earn?

The Virya Compute Risk Explorer prices an AI data center in 86 economies. Pick a country, a site size (1 MW, 100 MW, or 1 GW of grid power), a GPU, and a workload, and it stacks the cost of every GPU-hour against the rent it can earn: electricity, backup power, the building, staff, and a country risk charge. It shows where the site breaks even and what it may cost to protect it.

  • 86economies priced
  • 3site sizes, 1 MW to 1 GW
  • 6risk products
Compute Risk Explorer (opens in a new tab)
  • Delivered industrial power tariffs for every economy, with backup diesel priced in where the grid goes down
  • Break-even utilization, GPU rent, and power price for each site size, so you can see how much room the business has
  • Indicative prices for utilization, rent, resale, and outage floors and a power hedge, plus a year-by-year cash table

Contact

Get in touch

Questions, feedback on the games, the brief or the index, or an idea to work on together: send a note and it comes straight to my inbox. You can also email contact@anshulsaxena.com.