Introducing Anne Wacera Wambugu, our guest for our sixth TEA Breaks episode. Anne tells us about her personal journey to working in electricity access, her company Sunsafe, and what needs to change to retain women in engineering roles. She also argues that we must win more people over to solar by showing how it benefits users, rather than just focusing on the climate message.
‘TEA Breaks’ is a series where we chat to our experts on the TEA@SUNRISE project about Transforming Energy Access (TEA) and next-generation solar. Join us for 10-20 minutes with a cup of tea (or beverage of your choice) as we discuss the challenges and opportunities of renewable energy transitions.
Transcript:
Georgia Bevan: Hello everyone, I’m Georgia and welcome back to TEA Breaks, which is a series where we talk to our experts on the TEA@SUNRISE network about next-genertio solar and transforming energy access.
Today I’m joined by Dr Anne Wacera Wambugu, who is an electrical engineer based at Strathmore University. She’s also involved in electricity sector research for Strathmore’s UNESCO Chair. It’s a UNESCO Chair in Climate Change Resilience and Sustainability. And then on top of all that, she’s also the founder and CTO of company Sunsafe. So we’ll hear a little bit more about that later on.
We’ve also both got our tea here ready. So welcome, Anne. And to begin with, can you just tell us a bit about yourself and your area of expertise?
Q1: Can you tell me a bit about yourself and your area of expertise?
GB: And to begin with, can you just tell us a bit about yourself and your area of expertise?
Anne Wacera Wambugu (AW): So I am an electrical engineer, as said. My research focuses on electricity systems. So I think I have spent most of my time looking at solar. But then I realised at some point that it was important for me to start venturing into the grid because there’s issues related to the grid and electricity access.
My work is focused on access – I think I’m going to speak about why in a second – which is I’m getting people electricity to do the things that they want to do. So my work is very user-centric. Less, I’d say the comparison, the other side of it is having it be generation-centric, which is what the people who are supplying the electricity.
So I tend to look at what the users, and whether it’s SMEs or households or retailers, whoever it is that is on the usage end of the – whether it’s solar or the grid – how they’re experiencing electricity and how they’re using electricity and the challenges that they’re having.
Q2: What first attracted you to working in electricity access?
GB: Ok so what first kind of attracted you to working in this area of electricity access and user focused kind of stuff?
AW: My life. So I grew up in Western Kenya and actually ended up being an electrical engineer because I was very curious why we did not have electricity at home. But right now, looking back, I guess it was also like a question of why are we not installing solar? Because at the time solar had started picking up and I was like, why? Like solar seems very simple. Why aren’t we installing solar?
So it’s a personal – my journey as an electrical engineer is very personal. But sometimes that’s a problem because sometimes I get stuck in, you know, users and you know, the user experience and something. And someone will be like, well, we can’t finance that. But in my head I’m like, why are we not financing reasonable things for users?
So sometimes I run into problems because my head is very much at the space of serving the communities and similar communities to the one that I came from.
GB: Yeah I can see that’s a very strong motivation then to keep you going as well.
AW: Yes. And again, that’ll get me into a bit of trouble because I will keep going. Like that’s my anchor. I keep going back to it.
And yeah, so the people I work with though, I’m very happy that first of all, people like the team at TEA@SUNRISE and other people that I interact with on the regular, they seem to understand that this is a huge motivation for me. And I’m, I’m glad to be part of that network because it’s, it helps with acceptance, so to say, of this different vantage point that I bring.
GB: Yeah, no, that’s great. I think it’s really important to have these different perspectives involved in in the network, so, amazing.
Q3: Has being a part of the UNESCO Chair helped your team advance your efforts in electricity access? If so, how?
GB: So I mentioned that you were involved with the UNESCO Chair at Strathmore. Has being a part of this chair helped your team kind of advance your efforts in the area of electricity access? And if so, how?
AW: So the chair is climate change, resilience, and sustainability. So our work did start first, but the chair kind of consolidated the electricity stuff into somewhere. So the chair is kind of, right now it’s grouped into different research groups and the research group I lead is specifically around electricity. So if I was to say, part of what it did was structure us, give us a home.
Second, the UNESCO chair network is nice to have, so like there’s other chairs in other places, for example, the Swansea UNESCO chair. And I think it gives you kind of like a community. So that communal nature of the chairs is nice because like I’ll leave Strathmore, I’ll go somewhere else and I’ll be part of this chair and someone else will be a chair there. And then we’ll end up having a conversation because of the chair, specifically, doing stuff together because of the chair.
So it’s a nice network, it’s a good structure to have. And also it’s a good name, a good brand also just to be associated with, so to say.
Q4: Can you tell me a bit more about your company Sunsafe and what it’s trying to achieve?
GB: Great, ok so moving on to your company, Sunsafe now, could you tell me a little bit more about what it’s trying to achieve?
AW: OK, so I’m going to start with how Sunsafe came about. So when I joined the sector, which is sometime in 2016. I graduated in 2014, worked for the government in 2015, decided that’s not for me, then moved into research.
So at the time I was trying to figure out quality issues in the [solar] ecosystem. And I think there’s this story I tell, which is I went home. So home is in western Kenya. It’s quite a distance from here. So I went home. One of our neighbours called me. And they said I have a problem with my solar. It doesn’t, you know, like I watch a football match and then the thing goes off in the evening and it’s been charging the whole day. And I went and looked at the system. The battery was car battery, not a solar battery.
And I think this is the point where things started contrasting because I would go home and find all this, sorry to say, chaos on solar when it comes to solar products. And then I’d come back to Nairobi and be in these fancy workshops. And then in 2018, I’d be flying out to different countries speaking about solar in the UK in wherever, like completely removed from the realities of what we were speaking about.
In 2018 I was doing a lot of work on standards, IEC. So I met this old man called Chris Muller. He’d just retired from his electrical engineering profession, lives in Cambridge. So he told me about a QR code system that he had put together. So the QR code system is supposed to carry electrical, you know, information.
And I sat there and I thought, and I was like, wait, if I can place the QR code onto every electrical component, I can build an app that carried the mathematical components of this work, of sizing. So that all someone needs to do is scan the QR code, say which component they’re scanning, and even that information on which component they’re scanning is in there. And they would get a recommendation on the different sizes of products that they should use.
And that’s how Sunsafe started. So Sunsafe started in 2019 in a bar in South Korea. But we start fundraising seriously in 2021. So we tried Energy Catalyst twice and then we got it finally in 2022.
So what Sunsafe is, is a sizing tool. So right now we’re appending QR codes at the retailer level, but we’re hoping to work with like distributors to append QR codes so that people can just scan the products. So that’s, that’s, that’s number one.
There’s also, we’re hoping to put a find a technician near you because that’s finding technicians is really hard in rural areas.
GB: It sounds like actually quite a simple solution really. Which I guess is why it should work.
AW: Yeah, no, we thought about it. I was like someone has done this, this is so simple. Someone must have done this. And then we checked and the closest we found was NREL, that’s the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the US, they have a sizing tool, but you have to enter kilowatt hours. Because you’re not entering the power consumption of at the component level. You’re entering aggregated power consumption because, so the assumption with such systems, the higher level systems is that someone actually has knowledge to be able to do that. So what we’re doing is we’re moving it from there and bringing it way further down where you might even just need to scan a QR code and that’s it to actually get the proper size of a solar system.
GB: So is this aimed more at people who are just like individuals or business owners who might want to install their own solar systems?
AW: So the aim here is – so because it’s a regulated environment. So electrical systems in Kenya are heavily regulated. So we’re hoping to actually put this app in the hands of qualified technicians and then households can find them. So our biggest job right now is to train technicians in rural areas that then we can point households to.
Q5: How can we improve the inclusion of women in the renewable energy sector?
GB: Great, so how can we improve the inclusion of women in the renewable energy sector?
AW: Inclusion of women. So number one – attracting women into engineering and a lot of engineering spaces is not the hard part. What I’ve found is retention is the toughest bit.
I’ll say this as someone who’s supervised a lot of women. There are a lot of dynamics that women have to overcome, so to say. And there’s an assumption, there’s like this assumption of first of all women can’t work well together and people will actually tell you that, right, women don’t work well together, just wait until.
And I think that those stories have been told so much that they, some of the people that you’ll meet in the ecosystem have actually bought into that. There are narratives that have been sold to women that need to be undone, number one. Because what I’ve found is that the people who give women opportunities are fellow women.
Second is now I’m going to talk about like externally what I’ve seen. We have had a lot of instances. So I do a lot of mentorship here and there. I don’t even know. But every now and then a young person will approach me and I’ll spend some time talking to them. You come see me and the first thing I ask you is where are you spending most of your free time? Like whose work are you doing that you should not be doing? Because women do that a lot. Because there’s a man who’ll slack and you will run very fast to fix the situation for him. Can you take that time and use it for yourself instead? Can you take that time and use it maybe to go for a workshop that improves your career or something like that? So stop picking up the slack at your workplace because a lot of times you don’t get rewarded for it, and start seeing how you can use that extra time to improve yourself on the side. It’s completely OK to pick up slack at a workplace that you think you’ll be rewarded, but a lot of places don’t reward female engineers for being the helpers.
The way women exist in the ecosystem is complex. And we need to actually look at things that what people have taught young girls to do, right. You’ve been taught to be like this, to be like that, and point out to them how that is probably impacting their ability to move ahead. And that part of it requires being, and as I tell everyone, very OK with being disliked. It’s part of being a successful woman in anything. You just have to be comfortable with being disliked.
There’s a way we teach women to exist in society and then those things come and like work against them in workplaces. And then when we try to change, when women try to change, they become all the terrible words, the b-words, the whatever, you know, like you don’t even talk to her. She’s a terrible person. But in reality, that change, like you do actually need to switch to succeed. So maybe workplace dynamics is the term for it or something. But yeah.
Q6: What role can off-grid solar systems play in transforming energy access in Kenya?
GB: And then the next one is about – so the ‘TEA’ in TEA@SUNRISE stands for transforming energy access. What role do you think these sort of off-grid solar systems can play in transforming energy access in Kenya?
AW: So I’m going to start somewhere a bit far again. I like stories.
GB: That’s fine, start at the start.
AW: Yeah, a good way of explaining context, sometimes. What do we need electricity for? And I think I had to go back there and ask myself that question, after.
Remember for me context, like the context that I have is I live in a very different world from the one I grew up in. Every time I am in some fancy country sitting in a fancy workshop, I always ask myself why are we here and try and like contextualise it based on my upbringing and my life.
And the reason we need electricity is so that people have electricity availability, number 1, and electricity efficiency. So you need electricity available when you need it, and you need it to be sufficient to power what you need to power.
So what does that look like on the continent, or in Kenya? So say… I have a friend who’s a paediatric surgeon, and she’s operating like actually right now as we speak, she’s at a medical camp. And I think they’re doing operation of six kids per day. If electricity disappears in the middle of that camp, a lot of things can go wrong. She has all kinds of horror stories, using torches to finish up an operation and stuff like that.
So there’s, that’s what we want electricity for. We need the surgeon to have consistent electricity. We need a mum to be able to cook for her kids in the morning. We need a farmer to be able to pump water out of, you know, groundwater. We need all these different things done. And that should be the vantage point of anything that we do, the people that we’re serving. And every now and then I feel like we’ve lost vision of that part. We’ve lost vision of the reasons why we’re doing electricity access.
We’ve, we’ve been so many places talking to so many different people and the mid-level systems are where a good chunk of us should be focusing because that’s where my paediatric surgeon friend gets electricity to power, you know, the surgery for the surgery component of her work. So the government is installing mini grids, it’s doing commercial and industrial systems. The government is doing KOSAP with where they’re financing the small systems that are doing lighting TV’s and you know, and then there’s this midsection.
I don’t have any issues with household electrification, but I think we need to have a conversation, a larger conversation about financing people’s businesses just with the same level of ease as we’re financing, you know, as we’re financing household solar.
There’s this term that’s used on Twitter – Kenyans are still on X – “tree-huggers.” So it’s a term to describe people who only describe the energy ecosystem using carbon. And this is to say whenever you go to say we need to install coal, a coal plant, suddenly tree-huggers show up and say “solar”. The problem is not the solar, the problem is the capacity of solar to do the other thing. I said there’s two things, availability and sufficiency, the capacity of solar to serve the sufficiency bit. And because you’re focusing on the smaller systems or on the larger systems. So both of them have very big disadvantages.
The smaller systems cannot really do much in terms of work like you, besides lighting and the few things. The larger systems, especially the ones that feed into the grid, without a certain level of let’s say base load, they kind of end up sometimes destabilising the grid, right? The sweet spot is this middle point. But like I said, there’s very little focus on that middle point.
So there’s a generation of engineers and people who will be the next influential politicians or whatever in the next 20 years who are growing up seeing solar as not a good alternative because we’ve decided to focus on the wrong ends, not wrong in that they’re not needed. But we’ve poured our money all on these two sides and then concentrated on the carbon message rather than the energy sufficiency and availability message. And that’s losing a lot of people.
GB: Yeah, I can see if solar’s not meeting people’s needs, then they’re not going to be in favour of it for much longer, are they? So we’ve got to find a way around that.
AW: So yes, that’s the biggest concern. That’s what I’m hoping we can do with REACH. I think part of our… it’s to show number one, we can do local manufacturing. I’m really hoping that part goes through.
But also just to look at the challenges of solar right now and document them. Look, we can use solar at scale, but these are the challenges that we’re experiencing right now. I mean, these challenges can be solved in this and this and this way.
Q7: What do you hope to see achieved through TEA@SUNRISE?
GB: So anything else you’d like to say about what you hope to see achieved through TEA@SUNRISE?
AW: I think TEA@SUNRISE right now is heavy on solar, right, and the solar component? We need to add the battery conversation because solar and battery for us now, the people who are using the products, go hand in hand, right?
So the other thing I was telling Mark is because everyone says batteries are becoming very cheap. So when you tell me batteries are getting cheaper, what you’re saying is we’re sending, we’re going to be sacrificing Congo for a while now. We’re not buying it. So the other, for us, there’s a humanitarian problem right next to our doorstep and the rest of the world can remove itself from it. We can’t. Because both for humanitarian reasons, but also for the stability of the East African region, the idea that we can just keep mining from Congo and build more batteries and make them cheaper and then they get shipped back to Kenya, so that, you understand.
We really, I would like to see grid-scale sodium ion batteries become very, very commonplace because that’s our hope to reduce the, you know, humanitarian crisis that we have here.
There’s a lot more young Africans and millennials who think like me and more extreme, which is – “we need 5 coal plants”. There’s those ones. And those people are going to have that microphone, you know, they’re going to be handed the microphone by age because as our parents age out, my parents are retiring now. We’re the ones taking up the leadership of the continent.
This is not an advocacy for people to come and force people to change their minds. I’d like us to change people’s minds by virtue of actions. Let them see that solar is actually working and that actually changes their minds.
GB: Yeah, no, there’s some really good points. Thanks, Anne. Thanks very much. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, but it’s yeah. Good to have you on board.