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Associated Alumni

Bringing energy technology developed for Africa to Canada

Caleb Grove (BScEng'15, D-TME'15, MEng'17) spent six months building a microhome powered completely by renewable energy. Located in his hometown of Douglas, NB, the eight-by-12 foot house uses 100 per cent solar and wind energy to run its basic electrical services.

Grove has already completed 40 renewable energy installations in homes, clinics, and businesses on and around the island of Mbissa, Cameroon, where the seed for his company, Mbissa Energy was planted.

"We’ve built a Canadian demonstration site from the ground up," says Grove. "It runs completely off-grid and is powered, from panel to light bulbs, by the same technology that our systems use on the island of Mbissa."

Mbissa developed the home with the support of Energia Ventures and UNB's Technology Management & Entrepreneurship program.

At the pubic unveiling of the microhome last December, Grove expressed his excitement, "to show off the technology and business model that we’ve been able to develop this year with support from Energia Ventures and TME. I look forward to showing how this support is going to allow us to efficiently bring sustainable electricity to entire communities in Cameroon, Canada and beyond.”

Mbissa’s technology has already impacted close to 250 lives on the small-African island, where the company has a key beachhead for its product. Grove believes that communities in Canada -- where access to the traditional energy grid is either lacking or where homeowners seek alternatives to traditional energy -- can also benefit from this technology.

Grove returned to Cameroon in January to train another team of technicians who he hopes can complete installations across the entire island of Mbissa within eight months.

“Mbissa Energy is a great example of how a technology company can improve quality of life across the globe, while being a sustainable, for-profit business,” says Dhirendra Shukla, chair of the Dr. J. Herbert Smith Centre for Technology Management & Entrepreneurship at UNB. “Focusing on powering rural Africa with renewable energy will also allow these regions to leapfrog the traditional fossil fuel industry, and allow communities to remain self-sufficient."

How it all began

Grove and his family moved from New Brunswick to Cameroon when he was eight years old. Three years later they settled into the small rural community of Bambalang, in the mountainous North-West region of the country. Grove says that growing up in the area provided him with a unique perspective that allowed him to notice things that were needed in rural West Africa.

“When our power goes out [in North America] for a little bit, we have a hard time coping,” he said. “So to see somewhere where they never had it in the first place and yet, life goes on and it’s what they’re used to, it really has you rethink something like electricity and how we need it and how we use it and what issustainable.”

Time spent wandering the dusty roads of Bambalang led Grove to the small island of Mbissa, a community of about 3,000 with no possibility of grid development. The significant wind resource of the island was the seed for the idea of locally-sustainable wind energy.

Grove later returned to Canada and attended UNB. While studying engineering, he took a technology management & entrepreneurship elective. He was working on a group project that contemplated the idea of creating wind turbines in Africa when Dhirendra Shukla encouraged the group to think about their idea seriously and to promote it.

Shukla continued to encourage Grove to work through his idea and TME provided Mbissa Energy Systems with the initial funding to help begin the pilot project. “It [went]from being a sort of dream to being something where I’ve thought…maybe I could do this,” said Grove.

The central hub of the system for the pilot project was a clinic in Mbissa, which through solar panel technology has access to light 24 hours a day for the first time. The clinic also acted as a battery charging system, supplying part of the community with electricity through rechargeable batteries that can be carried by hand to homes in the surrounding area.

“One of the big questions we asked is, ‘what if people could carry electricity?’” said Grove, “because people walk all the time there. They’re used to moving around on foot and they do a lot of work by hand, so what if we had something that on their way to their farm, wasn’t big or heavy but could carry the electricity home with them.”

For a small fee, members of the community were able to take a battery to the clinic for charging and bring it back to their home to provide electricity for several days. It’s through charging this small fee that the system was able to grow.

“The first goal [was] to give them (the people of Mbissa) a foundation on which further development efforts may be established,” said Grove. “Electricity lays a foundation for many other things: agriculture and irrigation, better education systems. I’m really excited about that.”

“The second goal [was] to give people knowledge they can use to break the cycle of poverty. It’s using knowledge as a tool.”

The most important thing about this work was to make it sustainable, said Grove. Rather than coming into the area and providing the community with electricity, he wanted to teach members of the community to create it for themselves using locally available tools and materials.

“[I needed] to be able to leave and have it continue,” said Grove. “I see myself as a bridge that spans the gap between two very different worlds. My desire with the project and the ones that may follow is not merely to see electricity in Africa, and is not to make Cameroon share in the material wealth that fills richer nations. My dream is to have people cross that bridge. I want those from Canada to ‘see’ Mbissa and Cameroon and Africa, and the people who live in it and allow themselves to be fundamentally changed by what they see."

(Note: Part of this story appeared in the March 2016 issue of Alumni News direct)