Powering up rural households

A cold evening in the desert, the sun has set and you can hear the sounds of children laughing to the chatter of their cartoons in the distance. Sitting down to watch a 90-minute flick from beginning to end without the home’s power shutting off is a privilege that many families, on the reservation, are not used to. Let alone, keeping their basic necessities properly refrigerated or being able to use a simple light in the middle of the night. This is where Native Renewables arrives into the landscape.

This fiscally sponsored nonprofit organization was founded by Suzanne Singer and Wahleah Johns in 2016. Change Labs had the opportunity of working with Singer when she was accepted into their Business Incubator. Suzanne is Diné/Navajo and grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona. She earned her PhD in mechanical engineering and after helping to successfully install several off-grid solar PV systems across numerous Tribal Reservations, she was able to sit down with us to speak about her experience as a growing entrepreneur in the fields of renewable energies.

TELL ME A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS AND THE WORK YOU DO.

Our goal and our mission is to empower Native people to have energy independence and to build up the educational capacity. Some of the work we do is focused around education. It is a big piece of what we’re trying to implement; educating and training people in off-grid solar. We are working on financing systems for families and unfortunately that part is not ready yet, but we're still working hard on trying to get that to the point where families can start to make monthly payments towards the system. The system is for about 2.1 kilowatts. The goal was to have them be able to power an energy efficient refrigerator, some lights, and some electronics. A part of the education we want to implement is to help families take care of their systems to use proper energy management so that some systems last ideally 20 years. The other part of our program, which we don't do as much unfortunately but we do have it in our program, is trying to help debug or diagnose the systems that do exist on the reservation that are no longer working. That’s kind of a high level part of the stuff that we do.

Photography by Hundred Storms Creative

DO YOU HAVE ANYBODY WHO HAS INSPIRED YOU ON A PERSONAL LEVEL?

Yeah, there’s a lot of people. I had a fourth grade teacher who helped put me on an advanced math system track. I had an undergraduate research mentor that advanced my education to graduate school. My graduate advisor was great at getting me to think very deeply about technical problems and try to be rigorous in the way that I understand some things. My boss at Sandia, Sandra Begay, was instrumental in helping me just by being someone that is leading that path, working that path, and living that path in life. Seeing other women in leadership positions; friends that have helped me, advised me as I moved forward. I'm sure there's a lot more people that I'm kind of forgetting. Of course my parents.

YOU COULD SAY THAT YOU WERE INSPIRED ALL THE WAY FROM FOURTH GRADE AND THAT'S WHERE YOU STARTED TO CONNECT WITH WHAT YOU WERE GOING TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE.

Yeah, I would say so. Wow, maybe even younger and I just don't realize it. 

THAT’S AMAZING. SO ABOUT THE WORK YOU DO AND WHAT IS INVOLVED IN THE PROCESS OF COMPLETING A PROJECT, HOW BIG OF A TEAM DOES IT TAKE?

Yeah, for one of our bigger projects, we have four staff members at this point. We have our executive director who does a lot of the fundraising and kind of managing of our strategic plans in the future. I would say I’m more of a project manager. So it's a lot of creating processes and timelines; thinking about the cost of things, creating a plan, trying to get all the logistics lined up for when we implement a project and procurement buying equipment. We have a person who is an electrician and an educator. We rely on her to guide us through the electrical connections process and thinking about how to do it safely, but also helping us come up with these create and implement educational tools or ways to help communicate with the customers and the families that are out there. Our fourth member; he’s an electrical engineer. So he put a lot of equipment together but he is also the, I would say leading in.. we call it triage; so diagnosing the systems that don't work anymore. We have four of us who are pretty key and with our bigger projects, we usually bring on a few other subcontractors to help us do installs and other tasks to prepare. It takes several people to help get a project done. And of course it helped have the customer who's excited about the technology. That goes a long way. And I think as we, hopefully, as we grow we will have more people that we can bring on to help us do all of these things and help take some of the tasks off of my shoulders and plate.

DEFINITELY. YOU MENTIONED SOME OF YOUR CUSTOMERS. CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT THEM?

Yeah, we mostly work with individual homes. So we do residential scale projects mostly and I think some of the harder projects, I also find, is trying to tailor a system to what the customer wants. That process it's really good learning experience for both us and the customer. I think that's probably one of the bigger impacts that we've seen. Some of the families are reducing their use of generators and I think one of the families we worked with, the kids were just excited to watch a movie the entire way through. When they were using their generator, it would run out of fuel part way, so it kept cutting out in the middle of it. That was so cute to see and hear how excited they were just to be able to do that.

WOW, THAT IS REALLY TOUCHING. HOW DOES THE WORK CONNECT YOU TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM?

One of the cool things that we’re working on is incorporating traditional and cultural knowledge into our education and how we do things. I feel like I'm learning a lot, personally, from that. I am not fluent in Navajo. I speak a little but it's been also motivating to get better at learning things and trying to remember a lot of the stuff that I forgot. I think, just being able to work in a community that I haven't visited but just driven by. It’s been really cool meeting all those people that are from those communities and hearing their stories; just seeing how motivated people are to learn new things. The most fun thing is getting to be more embedded in the community because I've been gone for so long.

THAT'S AWESOME. YOU DO WORK THAT REALLY MAKES A DIFFERENCE. HOW LONG DOES IT USUALLY TAKE TO GET A PROJECT FINISHED?

Sometimes it takes months. Part of that is all the projects, we’ve had until now, have been a learning process so we’ve improved on every one. We’re still going through testing new ideas as we're moving forward. So, that in itself, it takes a little more time away from doing projects. Trying to do things like getting the equipment, we had to get the process set up to make things affordable. That's really challenging because parts are just so expensive and of course they’re more affordable than they used to be but they're still higher than we would like them to be. So we’re trying to figure out ways to manage the costs, it also takes some time. Before this month, we really didn't have office space so that was a limiting factor in figuring out where and how we were going to do everything. I think it's exciting because now we're starting to streamline, more to the point, where we can do more things. But now of course, Covid is here so we're slowing down for that reason; trying to be about safety, being mindful of our team, and then of course the communities that we go to. That’s another thing that does take planning and, you know, trying to organize with the family when we can go and when is everybody available to go. I'm excited to ramp up and do this at a much faster pace.

AND HOW HAS YOUR BUSINESS CHANGED SINCE WORKING WITH CHANGE LABS? HOW HAVE YOU EVOLVED AS AN ENTREPRENEUR?

Oh, yeah, there's a lot of things I'm thinking about that I never knew existed… the processes.

Some of the structures, the planning, all of the customer discovery, that kind of stuff, is new. I never knew about that before and how detailed you can get into everything. I think the coaching has been great. One thing that was great through this program and other programs is simply making a business plan. I remember looking at templates and being so overwhelmed. So I think all these programs helped train us in different sections so now I look at it and it doesn't seem so crazy. Whereas, before it was so intimidating. I've learned a lot about financial statements; how money information gets relayed. So that's been incredibly helpful as we're moving forward in our business. There's a ton of things, like marketing; I had very limited knowledge of marketing. So that was interesting, learning about that and speaking about branding. That was all new to me.

WOULD YOU RECOMMEND OTHER BUSINESSES GOING THROUGH THE SAME PROCESSES YOU WENT THROUGH WITH CHANGE LABS?

Yeah, absolutely.

Photography by Hundred Storms Creative

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE THAT YOU'D LIKE TO TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF AND YOUR EXPERIENCE AS AN ENTREPRENEUR?

Yeah, I'm always tired (we both laugh). It’s never-ending, which is something to be expected as you grow. I’m always learning something new which is good.

DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR ANYBODY WHO IS IN THE SAME FIELD AS YOU OR IS PURSUING SOMETHING SIMILAR TO WHAT YOU'RE DOING NOW?

I think one thing that has been cool is.. my world used to be just a lot of STEM people; so science, technical people, math mathematicians, and engineers. I don't think we get enough of a taste of doing business or entrepreneurship. Some of the cooler ideas that happen in tech don't necessarily blossom into the real world because there's either a cost thing or people just don't know how to push technology out through business. I think that was an eye-opening experience for me. There’s a lot of cool research going on out there but if you can't make it worth the money and if you can't find the right customers for it, then how does that impact your overall research.

To learn more about the work of Native Renewables or support their work, visit their website at www.nativerenewables.org