How merger of Shyft Solutions, SteamaCo will transform Nigeria’s energy landscape, says Ugwem Eneyo

By BASHIR ADEFAKA

After a decade of solving electricity metering problems with its unique technology which has given it a cutting-edge, Shyft Power Solutions led by its vibrant and visionary Chief Executive Officer, Ugwem Eneyo, spreads its tentacles recently by teaming up with SteamaCo, a United Kingdom based technology house led by Tom Parkinson to drive the same vision in the Nigerian energy landscape.

In a media interview with journalists, the duo of Ugwem Eneyo, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Shyft Power Solutions, the United Kingdom counterpart and Managing Director of SteamaCo, Tom Parkinson, addressed the merger between the two companies and how the collaboration will accelerate and scale up energy services using its unique IoT hardware and integrated hardware to deliver reliable, affordable power to communities in emerging markets.

While Shyft Power Solutions is an indigenous company helping power companies to, more reliably, deliver affordable, cleaner and more resilient power to communities, SteamaCo, an Anglo-African technology, empowers energy providers for more and better output. Excerpts:

Interview with Shyft Power Solutions’ Ugwem Eneyo:

Tell us about Shyft Power Solution and what exactly does it aim to achieve in the Nigerian electricity sector?

Shyft Power Solutions is an energy technology company which began its operations about a decade ago, with an aim to help power companies deliver reliable, affordable and cleaner energy solutions. It is a known fact that the country is plagued with energy challenges, the intermittent power supply.

Power impacts us all, from the wealthiest to the lowest of income earners, from the urban to the rural. It has the ability to create jobs, it has the ability to transform the economy and society.

At Shyft, what we recognized was that these power companies now had, basically, assets, whether it is generators, solar, batteries, at many locations that they needed to maintain to keep power in buildings like this office, up and running. But you can imagine the challenge of scaling such a power company if you do not have visibility into what’s happening remotely. You would have to be sending staff out, you had to be seeing interruptions in what is going on, right?  Somebody is calling you, saying, “Hey, the generator is down, what is happening?”

And so at Shyft, one of the first things we realized is that, for solutions like micro-grids, backup power, solar, battery technology to really scale through and meet the energy demands of Nigerians, the power companies that are delivering these solutions needed to be able to support, maintain and operate those types of solutions.

So Shyft Power Solutions got started by delivering, monitoring and controlling solutions for backup power systems and micro-grids. We specialize in building Internet of Things (IoT) IoT, to sensors, gateways, to basically monitor everything you can imagine about your energy systems, remotely, as well as the software applications that not only provide that monitoring but help the power companies to understand how to handle things like preventative maintenance, keep those systems up and running and also design and deliver more effective, cost-effective solutions for Nigerian businesses.

How that business has emerged over the years, though, went from simply monitoring and control of assets to recognizing that the Nigerian consumers also wanted to feel empowered and understand “what am I paying for when I am buying power?” Right? There is a lack of transparency that exists because of gaps in metering solutions and monitoring solutions.

So because of our expertise, again, in power, IoT and software, we moved into the space of also providing, at the time we called it sub-metering, so metering solutions not necessarily at the utility or at the distribution company scale but for independent power producers, facility management companies, estates, where you as a homeowner or, let’s say, a commercial business want to understand how much energy “am I using,” being able to pay for it in more streamlined, intelligent ways like via mobile apps, and have transparency in what services you are being provided by your power company.

You talked about issues around consumers wanting to know what they consume. One major issue around the energy and electricity sector is about the metering gap. The government has been on this for a very long time. Several deadlines have been provided, yet the DisCos have been threatened by the government, yet, that huge gap is still there. And you see some residents protesting and all that. So, for an organization like you, it is a decade you have been here. How do you think you can quickly meet that gap and how do you bridge that metering gap and what is the organization doing to address that?

Right, Shyft was in the energy technology space but only recently started moving into the metering space in about the past two, three years. Prior to that, we were working with power companies, like I mentioned, for monitoring and control solutions for their infrastructure and for their assets.

This has been an ongoing challenge, but part of what has been exciting about our merger with SteamaCo is that SteamaCo was bringing a lot of expertise in delivering metering solutions, certainly in the off-grid market, working with multiple stakeholders, institutions that fund and finance initiatives to address metering gaps in rural areas. And Shyft had quite a bit of experience working with power companies in semi-urban and urban areas.

We think right now joining forces is really going to allow us bring our expertise in working with institutions and investors that can fund and bring capital that are required to really fund the meters that are needed to meet the gap. And Shyft brings the experience, the local knowledge and experience on how to work with power companies, what they need, how metering solutions should actually be built and scaled up to actually operate effectively in the market.

Shyft and SteamaCo coming together now are at the forefront of recognizing that for investors who are concerned about where they should invest in the energy landscape, this is where digital transformation is necessary. We need to be able to make data-driven decisions.

Investors need to be able to make data-driven decisions. So Shyft and SteamaCo are saying we are going to move power forward and deploy metering solutions because we know that there is an opportunity that is going to arise from having a better visualization from digitizing the energy landscape by deploying meters. And so we are really optimistic and excited about what that means and I do think that there has been quite a bit of movement in the power sector over the past two years.

With more decentralization, states having more rights to do things, franchise models are empowering people. We are seeing more and more independent power producers emerging and scaling up and I think that alongside collaboration with the DisCos, we are really starting to see the proper momentum. So you are right, it has been slow movement over the past several years, over the past decade, but the ball is rolling, the momentum is here. We can see it happening as well as what has been happening in the regulatory space over the past 24 months.

Everybody knows that there has been a huge challenge in the power sector in Nigeria. And also there has been kind of a huge challenge in establishing businesses in the country. So, I want to know what your driving force is, which made you still go ahead and establish Shyft in Nigeria despite all of these challenges?

Yes, this is actually moving into a more personal question. You might not realize that is what you are getting at. So, my family is from outside Port Harcourt, from the Niger

Delta area and, so, we all know the history of how development, infrastructure, environment and how these things have impacted people, right? Nigeria is very wealthy when it comes to resources.

Companies come here to do business, thrive and often we do not necessarily see that positively impacting the people and the communities.  Growing up and seeing that and the impact that, that type of development had directly on my family, made me feel that I could play a very important role in building a power company that not only was focused on innovative solutions, building premium products and technology, but that also recognized that we are here to solve problems for people, for consumers.

It is not just about us being an impact company. We are not just about making money. And so as you can see probably from meeting with some of my team today, when Shyft got started, we are primarily Nigeria-based.

Most of our team members are Nigeria-based. We believe in global collaboration because we think that is important but I wanted to start a company that allowed the consumers, the people closest to the problems to be at the forefront of solving the problems.

And so, for me, I know that doing business in Nigeria is tough, but I am a Nigerian. I am Nigerian-American. Right? So I have a privilege of being able to say that I want to be able to go home and positively contribute to my family and where I come from, and if not me, then, who? That was the rationale.

Yes, I am quite excited by some of the responses that you have provided. You have heard about what actually was the inspiration leading to you coming to Nigeria despite the challenges in the sector. You have said that, which is quite good. But now, let’s get to work. How quickly will the Shyft metering units be produced, rolled out to be made available to electricity consuming communities?

That is a very good question because the work has long begun. So, Shyft metering solutions have now been in the Nigerian market for well over about two years. So, this building that we are sitting in today has monitoring controls and metering solutions that are deployed by Shyft.

We have at this point several thousand Nigerian consumers that are using Shyft FlexView, our sub-metering solution. And most recently, we collaborated with Eko Atlantic Utilities for the Eko Atlantic development, rolling out metering solutions for their development of that IPP. So we are already seeing consumers use Shyft technology.

We are very excited about the early momentum that we have. But you are right, there is a lot of work to do. And part of our merger and collaboration with SteamaCo is allowing us to scale up and do that faster together.

You ended by talking about your collaboration with SteamaCo. Can you give us an insight into the partnership between Shyft and SteamaCo and what shared objectives both organizations have that were able to bring the project together on the same page? 

So there is a concept that started in academia but I think is now more commonly used called energy poverty, which is people are spending too much on power. And that power is a quality power. It is not reliable power. And it is not fully meeting the needs of its consumers.

We are on a mission to eradicate energy poverty. And we think the method of doing so starts with ensuring that power companies can provide productive power. That means power companies need to be able to be reliable in the services that they provide.

And in order to do that, there is a suite of digital solutions that are necessary. That is advanced metering infrastructure. It is the software applications that they are able to use to not only handle billing and collections but to detect losses and abnormalities in the system.

That also means being able, as I mentioned earlier, to monitor their infrastructure, monitor their assets, mitigate interruptions and quickly address interruptions in their infrastructure. So together, Shyft and SteamaCo companies' merger will bring their expertise in metering solutions, especially in collaborative micro-grid projects, projects that bring in multinational stakeholders using Shyft local expertise in IoT and software.

Together, we are working with power companies to really drive digital transformation. So I think the key theme there is the digital transformation of the power sector, of utilities, turning things from manual operations, from what we call dumb, not because it is not smart but because it is not digitized. We are trying to transform that.

And we think if you can drive operational efficiency, if you can prevent losses, if you can drive transparency and reliability with consumers, that is really going to allow the power sector to move forward.

But what would you tell us about your company’s definition of innovation in the context of power solutions for Nigeria?

That is a very good question. I would like to give you a short answer, but of course I am going to give a little bit of a story. You know, there is a story about the inventor and what they need. This is before the automobile. They would have said, you know, I need a faster horse. That is innovation. Help us breed faster horses. But then comes along the likes of Henry Ford and whatnot, and the response was not a faster horse. It was not any type of genetic engineering.

Instead, it was the vehicle, and the engine, and then all the innovation that came around from that. And I think that really speaks to the spirit of innovation. For Shyft innovation is about intimately understanding the nature of the consumer’s problem and not starting at what we believe is a solution, right? And so that is why, again, our collaboration is so unique because we are bringing together folks who are brilliant engineers, brilliant developers, brilliant businessmen and women, as well as also bringing in folks who are brilliant but also bring forth local knowledge and intimately understand the challenges that Nigerians face.

We live it. Right? The people, who are building our products, are living and experiencing the problems that we are trying to address. And so for us, innovation is responding to the root problem and building things that, at Shyft, we say one of our core values is we take on what others call impossible. That is what innovation is about.

It is about when people say, “Oh, how are you going to do this in Nigeria?” Nigeria does not work like this. That is okay. That is exciting to us. That is what we lean on to. So what I am saying, this power sector thing, nothing has really progressed and moved for nearly 10 years. Coming together is exciting to us.

That is where innovation happens, is where we are going to be building something that, for most people would have said, in Nigeria, you are doing this, you are building this. That is what excites us, and that is the spirit behind our culture of innovation.

Okay, so what key metrics will you use to measure success in the power sector? 

There are few. One is metering points, so the number of meters, really, that we are deploying. It is a key indicator of how many consumers we are impacting, how many lives we are impacting, and how we are addressing the gap, the well-understood metering gap that exists.

Secondly, you heard me mention lives impacted. That is a key one for us when we think about impact. So making sure that we are providing something that really is transforming the lives for African consumers, Nigerian consumers.

I would also like to emphasize that we keep track of things like the amount of energy processed, passing through our technology, our meters and our monitoring solutions, as well as Naira process. So we want people to be able to pay for power in a transparent manner. So if we can get them to be paying for power using our applications, our software helps us show that we are moving from informal metering and collections to transparent and reliable metering and billing.

You talked about informal metering consumption and, no doubt with your technology, what do you expect to see in terms of consumer behaviour and electricity consumption patterns? 

Oh, I could talk all day about this one. I am an engineer by background, so the data is very exciting to me. One of the first things that we see is your bank account. How many of us would have a bank account and you put money in, but you never actually log in and check? We could not do it.

What do we do? We all go in and we see, wow, okay, we are spending this, we are spending this, and we adjust our behavior as we see the bank balance. Even as you get an alert, you are seeing all these alerts and you are adjusting your behavior. It is a very similar thing that happens when a consumer can open their phone and actually see, not just you have topped up, but let me see my credit, let me see my consumption dropping, let me see my behavior patterns.

People then feel not only more empowered because they feel like now I can make better decisions, but we also see people using tools on our apps to then budget how they want to spend on power. They can actually forecast and say, my historical behavior patterns this month suggest that I am going to overspend what I want to before the end of the month. That is something you could not do before.

In a society where energy poverty, as I mentioned, is a thing, we are all feeling like we are spending too much on power. If I can actually see how much I am using as I am using it, one, allows me then to make better decisions for myself and my household, but two, it also helps improve the relationship between the consumer and the power provider. We all know that there is sometimes a sense of distress between the two, where you feel like, is what you are doing really what I used? Even with a meter, you are thinking that your credit is running fast.

Now, it is not even that my credit is running fast. If I turn off this light, I will now see my consumption drop. That breeds a level of confidence and trust.

That is how we really, for us, innovation is changing the culture, the feeling, the sentiment that we have towards power. Power should not be something that is frustrating to Nigerians after shifting the scale of the market.

For the average consumer, can you explain clearly how your technology differs from the traditional metering system?

Yes, so between both organizations, we offer quite a vast suite of solutions, but are focused on what the consumer actually sees versus the power companies themselves. For the typical Nigerian consumer, you top up, you buy a token, you punch it in, so you probably have to be in proximity to your meter, or somebody needs to be in proximity to punch it in. It tops up.

You know it finishes when the light goes out. That is it, okay? So now, with applications like FlexView, that is one of our product lines, you open your mobile app, your computer, or if you have access, you can go to your meter, but you don’t need to be in proximity of your meter. From anywhere, on a phone or a computer, you can see what your credit is on your meter, you can make a transaction to top up your meter there, no need for a token, no issue with error, no token generation, nothing like that, not losing the token pin, or all of that kind of stuff.

You get low balance alerts. You can get alerts to let you know about your consumption pattern, meaning before your credit runs out, you are getting alerted three days before, two days before, your credit's about to run out, you are seeing what that balance is, so you can top up, or so you can set up auto top up. So once your credit hits a certain amount, you can top up your meter automatically.

Not only that, with the metering experience today, you probably don’t know how much you are using when. That is, again, that feeling of, I just topped up this meter, and now it is saying it’s finished, something is wrong with my meter. That no longer has to be the case.

Again, from anywhere in the world, as long as you have access to your phone or a computer or a device, you can actually see in real time what you are consuming, or near real time what you are consuming, and, again, that lets you know, okay, we’re using a little bit too much right now, or even getting a sense of what appliances and devices you are running in your house that is actually driving high consumption. So these are some of the key things that consumers will experience differently with our applications. I think the other thing with FLAG, we do a lot of work with estates.

In a joint usage of meters in a community or big flat dispute can erupt. Now when we work communities, you can actually have a meter that is metering power that may not be coming from the disco, that is shared amongst the estate, and splitting that cost in a way that better reflects usage and also prevents you from fighting with this neighbour or that neighbour who is handling collections or who should pay what bill.

So, we do a lot of work with helping communities and service facilities better manage power and how shared resources are provided.

How will your solutions improve the electricity management for the underserved or rural development? What benefits are they getting from the solutions? 

So, there are a lot of initiatives ongoing. These are global initiatives, global agencies, organizations like the World Bank who have funding specifically for rural and lower income communities. Think about organizations like the Rural Electrification Agency and the work that they do.

The people and institutions that fund a lot of those micro grid projects or projects to bring power to rural and low-income communities are doing so oftentimes as an investment. They want to understand the impact of their investment. They want to see the systems working.

In order for that to happen, you need to be able to do what? Collect payment reliably on time from those consumers, meaning you need a metering solution to make sure that not only are you able to collect payment from the consumers, but also to be able to gather data about the quality of power, reliability of power that you are deploying and making sure the systems are up and running. We know that maintenance culture is a bit of a challenge in certain regions and certain markets. In collaboration, again, with SteamaCo, which has done quite well over the past decade, not only in Nigeria, but across the continent. We are bringing metering solutions to rural and low-income communities. We think that will help foster and drive, provide data and evidence that will continue to drive additional funding into micro grids for low income and rural communities.

Interview with Mr. Tom Parkinson, Managing Director, SteamaCo

No doubt, you are in Nigeria because of the merger between your company, SteamaCo, and Shyft Power Solutions. Can you give an insight into the merger and what was the driving force?

The driving force behind the merger was that the way we see the market in Nigeria and across Africa is that there are millions of people and energy users. And what we want to bring is the visibility of the users' usage and behaviour to the people who are providing that power usage.

Now, SteamaCo traditionally has dealt with the majority off-grid. We are moving on to the grid market. But there was a sort of gray space, as it were, which was in the estate management and facility management space, whereby a disco's point would end at the bulk meter.

And so, there could be a whole community and there could be a whole commercial park, an industrial park, where there would be no visibility and you have a problem collection at that point. So, what we are trying to do is empower the power providers with as rich a data as possible. So SteamaCo and Shyft have tackled very similar problems, but for different markets.

And what we are trying to do by this merger is bring together the expertise and experience in solving that to give a much richer picture to the people who are providing power, that then we can solve the major problems that exist in Nigeria together. That was the kind of overall view. But when we met with the Shyft team, it was clear we had a very similar vision on how we want to approach the problem, but also there were complementary skills. So it was not just an overlap, it was a combination that we are very confident will work really strongly together.

So now, how do you envision the merger contributing to the broader transformation of Africa’s energy landscape?

Fantastic question. So, the key driver behind SteamaCo’s purpose is that energy alongside transport are the things which drive economies forward. So, we are focused on enabling people to gain access to reliable, affordable, and productive power.

That will generate jobs, and the jobs will generate security. We cannot live in a world where there are a billion people who don't have good quality jobs and lack security.

This is a key driver behind this entire project and mission we are working on. And fundamentally, it's unfair. Grids have existed for nearly 100 years across the world. There are specific problems which are blocking the grid working effectively in sub-Saharan Africa.

And we are trying to overcome some of those problems systematically. And one of the key ways of doing that is by bringing visibility to end usage. And so, this is about the old adage of, you can't manage what you don't measure.

So, we are bringing about the help for the people who are providing power with the measurement. And so, we are going to start, the majority of our work is in Nigeria. Nigeria is the light of Africa, right? It is the major economy, and it is going to be a huge global powerhouse, but it needs energy to do that.

So what we are doing is we are setting a blueprint in how energy monitoring and management can work in a digitized, smart, internet-connected, cloud-enabled world, where we can use that to then spread the best practices which we have developed, the investment which we can bring in, which provides bankable projects.

We will spread that out across Africa. Now we are already in, and our systems are already working in 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, right? But Nigeria will be the best place to start, is the best place to start, and will be what the other African countries look to as that is how you do it right. And we will be the drivers behind that.

So, what are the key benefits of this merger arrangement for both companies, and how will this impact your operations and services in Nigeria?

That is a fantastic question. So, the benefits of the merger are, from our perspective, quite clear. Firstly, we get a really super-talented team in Nigeria that has been built. That helps us expand our combined footprint. So, we will now have offices in both Abuja and Lagos, but we will have a really talented team on the ground. So firstly, it is about the people, right? So, it’s a combination of great skill sets. The next is on the product set.

So, Shyft has some unique and innovative technologies. SteamaCo has its own set of unique and innovative technologies. Bringing those together will provide a much better value proposition to the power providers.

And what we are looking to do is, in a world in which it is becoming more complex in terms of energy management, so more generation sources, more sort of producers, so people who are generating their own power, more things like Electric Vehicles coming into the market, makes a much more complicated and complex energy system. And it is systems like the ones that Shyft has built with its Connect platform, alongside our sort of metering platform, that is going to enable that transition and the effective management of all those assets on board. So that is one of the key sort of product reasons.

There are also synergies, which come from this, from working together and from leveraging more investment, because we have both got very supportive investors on either side. Bringing those together can really help us grow as a combined company.

When you do business in any country there is always something about government policy. So what is your expectation? You definitely need the government to take part. Not really for the government to come and invest or to come and put money but, since what affects the environment also affects the business, what do you want from the Nigerian government by way of ease of doing business in order for you not to regret and for Nigerians to also benefit generally at the end of the day? 

Great question. The purpose of the government is to enable its citizens to live prosperous and safe lives, right? So the best thing the government can do is set stable and progressive policies which enable outside investment to come into this sector. Foreign Direct Investment is needed to drive the economy not only in Nigeria but globally. Yes. The business too needs outside capital. It needs dollars coming into the country to help boost the economy. The way that it can do that is by having a stable power sector.

It needs outside investment to bring that power sector to fruition. And so it is setting the enabling environment to leverage that investment. And it is systems like Shyft and SteamaCo which provide the revenue assurance and the bankability of these investment projects for these investors, right? People want to invest in Nigeria.

It is a country of over 200 million people, the median age is 18, a really good education sector. There is dynamism everywhere you look. But the only way that can happen is if the government enables through transparent practices, through clear guidelines and clear regulation, an environment in which people can invest and bring smart meters in.