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https://www.positive.news/environment/second-act-the-pioneers-giving-green-tech-a-new-spin/>
"When Tania Saxby, fresh out of university, first joined Connected Energy (CE)
back in 2019, she was the only woman in the company. It was quite a blokey
environment, she recalls. Based in Norfolk, home to legendary sports car maker
Lotus, CE specialises in repurposing electric vehicle batteries to store
energy. “It was all ex-Lotus and software engineers, keen on motor sports,
tinkering with their cars at weekends,” Saxby (pictured below) recalls with a
smile. She’s quick to add that she was made very welcome in the team, but being
a woman in such a sector was still something of a novelty.
That said, CE’s core business is pretty novel too. They combine ‘second life’
EV batteries – ones that no longer have sufficient capacity to power vehicles,
but that can still store plenty of energy – into giant power packs. These can
provide a reliable supply of onsite electricity to sectors such as data
centres, with the watts supplied from a local source like solar PV.
Increasingly, they also have a role in energy trading: buying surplus power
from the grid when it’s cheap, storing it and selling it back when it’s more
expensive. It has obvious sustainability advantages: taking a potential waste
problem, a hefty spent battery, and turning it into a key component of the
fast-growing renewable energy system.
Still in her 20s, Saxby has a quiet confidence beyond her years, and as CE has
grown, so have her responsibilities. Now head of sustainability, she’s in
charge of ensuring its green credentials stack up. “A big part of my remit is
to quantify the carbon savings in using second-life batteries compared to new
ones.” Then there are the usual wider issues – environmental impacts, health
and safety – and now she’s embarking on a thorough life cycle assessment
process too: making sure CE’s offering really ticks the right boxes from cradle
to grave. “All that’s pretty crucial,” she says, “because you would soon catch
the flak if you were selling something on the basis of sustainability and then
found wanting.”
There’s a virtuous spiral at work: as a greater proportion of electricity is
produced by renewables like solar and wind, so the need for energy storage
increases. Meanwhile, “more sectors electrifying, especially transport, means
more batteries,” says Saxby. “Even some mining operations are shifting to EVs,”
she points out. “Their trucks are huge –the tyres alone are the height of a
person.”
No longer the only woman in CE, she credits the arrival of more female staff
with the dawn of “a more open atmosphere in the office, and that means more
engagement between teams”. In the outside world too, the gender barriers are
breaking down, and fast. Saxby has been speaking about her work at universities
since 2021 and has seen a significant increase in the number of women who turn
up. “I say to them every year: ‘If you want to secure a job, specialise in
electrical engineering.’
“When I tell people what I do, and sometimes I have to explain it, because they
often don’t know about energy storage, they ask: ‘So you’re actually doing
something about all these used EV batteries we keep hearing about?’
“‘Yeah, we are.’ ‘Wow – that’s cool!’”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
