In 1998, a 10-year-old Robert Kabera was trying to study a high school science textbook by the light of a kerosene lamp in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana. But the strong desert winds kept blowing it out as soon as he lit it. "I didn't know much about electricity back then," he recalls. "I just knew that after living with darkness for six years, I had become obsessed with light."
The darkness Kabera is referring to isn't just literal. A refugee from the Rwandan genocide, his family of six, along with 17 neighbors, had hid for weeks at a time crammed together in a tiny tunnel dug beneath his home until they could escape the country. His family eventually made their way to a refugee camp in the Kalahari.
Kabera says that lampless night in the desert set the path of his career: turning the lights on for those who lack power, and keeping them on in the face of growing climate threats to the power grid, such as storms that bring down power lines and flood transformers. "We need to use technology to protect and restore nature in order to bring resilience to the grid," he says. "If we can do that well, we'll be able to manage the risks of climate change."
Kabera and his family eventually moved to Atlanta. He graduated from Stanford in 2011 with a degree in engineering, and started a credit-scoring agency focused on connecting small farmers in Africa to loans for desperately needed fertilizer and irrigation equipment. In partnership with the Obama administration, he worked on an electricity-grid project to bring energy to rural communities in Africa. By the time that project ended in 2016, Kabera knew he wanted to focus on ways of keeping electricity flowing despite extreme weather events, which are becoming more frequent under climate change.
Grid failures are usually an information problem. Although power companies often have the crew, tools and know-how to prevent damage to wires and other equipment from hurricanes, storms and floods, or to reroute power and quickly effect repairs when damage strikes, they often lack knowledge of when and where the damage was likely to hit so they could take action ahead of time.
Kabera was convinced that artificial intelligence could help. In 2020, he co-founded a "gridtech" company, Sync Energy AI, to develop AI programs that synthesize weather data, government databases that detail the location of trees in and around cities and details of local power grid wires and customer usage patterns. The software then spits out predictions of which lines will be at highest risk during a given weather event, and which customers will be most affected. The company can then cut back branches and trees around those wires, reinforce the wires, reroute power around the most vulnerable spots and position repair crews at those locations before the damage occurs.
Sync, which has 20 employees, has already deployed its software to monitor the tree risks to the power grid in Charlotte, North Carolina, and is in discussion with other municipalities. It is also developing partnerships with the insurance companies that usually foot the bill for power grid losses from a storm. Kabera says he hopes to employ Sync's approach to other climate risks over time. In addition to trying to halt and even reverse climate change, society should deploy tools like AI to ensure we can roll with the coming punches. "I call it sustainability AI," he says.
It's one step toward bringing light to those who risk losing it.
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