When it comes to demonstrating expertise and innovation, Elizabeth Nyeko wears a number of hats – as an investment banker with Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, as an academic researcher at Imperial College, and now, as founder of Modularity Grid, an entrepreneurial start-up and green energy provider that has already helped transform the power infrastructure of off-grid communities in rural Uganda, where she was born. Now she is turning her attention to bringing that same opportunity for cheaper, greener power to Britain’s farms.
“By using decentralised energy systems that generate electricity on-site, there’s an opportunity for us to get our farms off-grid,” she says, “which will bring their energy costs down by around 30 percent, and create savings that can help their business. Because Britain’s farms are struggling, especially with energy prices going up, it’s something I’m hugely passionate about.”
Using a grant from Innovate UK, Modularity Grid led a project to build a commercial-scale biomass-fired demonstrator in Uganda, where their system brought down the price people paid for electricity, from $56 per kilowatt hour to $26. “We thought, if it’s working so well here, is there an opportunity for us to do the same in England too?”
Discover the revolutionary CEO driving a cheaper greener energy system
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As prices rise, entrepreneur Elizabeth Nyeko is rewriting the energy rule book to help farmers save money with greener, cheaper power using an innovative, decentralised approach
“The business is a reflection of my life,” she says. “I’ve had this very varied career, which means I’ve been able to pick experiences from each one, then bring them all together to tackle a problem I’m passionate about.”
Her work in investment banking provided her with “that perspective as to how we can get infrastructure financed at scale”. Then there is her experience gained in successfully trialling and setting up a biomass-fired mini-grid in northern Uganda. And on top of that, there is the essential spark of curiosity, that mother of invention, innovation and connection that fuels so many advances in human culture.
“It’s about stopping and thinking about things in a new way, not accepting what is out there as the norm,” she says. “It’s about questioning what’s out there and questioning what’s considered acceptable today. And then taking that and asking what’s a better way to do it – how could we redesign things based on what we know and what is out there? That’s the most exciting bit, because you get to bring together different areas of thinking and tech and combine it together.”
Strikingly, the source material they will use to bring cheap, off-grid and sustainable energy to rural Britain is the 90 million tonnes of manure our dairy and beef herds produce each year. “A lot of farms already have the waste they need to power them,” says Nyeko. “It’s very easy to install, there’s no change in behaviour, no effort on their side. We install the system and connect that up to their electricity supply. It’s power as a service. What a farmer wants is cheaper electricity, and that’s what we have to offer.”
For Nyeko, farms – especially our smaller family-run smallholdings – are the invaluable custodians and keepers of rural Britain. “For me it starts with farms and the role they play in our food system,” she says. “It’s an industry that’s so crucial, and there’s a lot of talk about farms diversifying, but if they do that then we end up with no food grown locally. We cannot go in that direction. Farms are the stewards of our countryside, and there’s a lot of scary research out there about how, by 2050, there won’t be any more small farms in the UK, and that would be terrifying. That’s a horrific future. If we can make a contribution to prevent that nightmare scenario, that’s what I want to dedicate myself to.”
ELIZABETH NYEKO
MODULARITY GRID
Finding viable, commercial real-world solutions at the intersection between energy systems, agriculture and sustainability is no easy task. For Nyeko, her previous experiences proved invaluable in conceiving a sustainable, affordable, off-grid energy supply and making it a commercial reality – a goal boosted by becoming one of the Rising Stars of the Founders Forum, a network supported by Samsung, to promote the positive impact of technology.
USING EXPERIENCE TO BUILD SOMETHING NEW
TURNING WASTE INTO POWER
Nyeko is one of the Rising Stars of the Founders Forum, a network supported by Samsung, to promote the positive impact of tech. Of her innovative approach she says: “It’s about stopping and thinking about things in a new way, not accepting what is out there as the norm.”
Investment banker and academic researcher Elizabeth Nyeko has turned her considerable talents to helping farmers, creating an off-grid, decentralised power systems that generate energy using biomass produced as a by-product onsite
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Nyeko sees farms – especially smaller family-run smallholdings – as the custodians of rural Britain. “For me it starts with farms and the crucial role they play in our food system,” she says. “There’s talk about farms diversifying, but if they do that then we end up with no food grown locally. We cannot go in that direction."
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