James McHugh

Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer

As Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, McHugh is responsible for the wholesale and retail business units, customer operations, commercialization, and innovation. He serves on the Constellation Executive Committee, which sets strategy and direction for the company.

Constellation is the nation’s largest supplier of clean energy with more than 32,400 megawatts of generating capacity from nuclear, wind, solar, natural gas and hydro assets. The new, publicly traded company will produce about 10 percent of America’s carbon-free energy, making it a leader in addressing the climate crisis and an indispensable partner to businesses and state and local governments with its carbon-reduction goals.

Professional background

McHugh previously served as chief executive officer and executive vice president of Constellation, a subsidiary of Exelon Generation, where he headed the company’s leading competitive retail and commodities business. Prior to that, he was senior vice president of wholesale trading. In that role, he was responsible for the wholesale trading and portfolio management of Exelon’s generation, load, transactions, and contracted assets. The group optimizes the value of the company’s national portfolio through its trading decisions in the power, natural gas, and environmental products markets. Before his wholesale trading work, McHugh was senior vice president of portfolio management and strategy. In that role, he was responsible for fundamental analytics and commodity price forecasting, the portfolio management hedging strategy for the company’s integrated generation and load portfolios, pricing and structuring of complex transactions, product management, transmission analytics, quantitative analytics, and wholesale/retail integration. 

Prior to the Exelon-Constellation merger in 2012, McHugh was the director of the Midwest and mid-Atlantic regional trading desks for the Exelon Power Team. He has held various leadership positions on the Power Team, including director of portfolio management and manager of the proprietary trading book. 

Before joining the Power Team, McHugh worked for five years at Conectiv Energy in Wilmington, Delaware, where he was the director of power trading for the company’s integrated power portfolio of generation assets and load positions in the PJM markets. He also worked at PJM Power Pool as an engineer in the scheduling and operations groups, where he was responsible for analyzing PJM’s interchange limits and scheduling interchange transactions between PJM and neighboring control areas.

Community work

McHugh is a member of the board of trustees of the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore.

Educational background

McHugh has a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Business Administration in Finance from Villanova University in Villanova, Pennsylvania.