For one Awele Uwagwu, a Nigerian youth, clean energy has always been a dream. According to MIT News, Uwagwu was born and raised in Port Harcourt, which is a small city on the southern coast of Nigeria; the hometown “shaped his initial interest in understanding the role of energy in our lives.”
Oil and gas-colored memories fog Uwagwu’s mind. “Many of the jobs in that area are in the oil sector, and I saw a lot of large companies coming in and creating new buildings and infrastructure. That very much tailored my interest in the energy sector,” Uwagwu recalls.
Everything was “bad”, from the air to the drinking water, and Uwagwu didn’t want to live like that. He knew there was something better out there.
Part of Uwagwu’s future mission is to decide whether or not solar energy is an affordable option for Nigeria, then to implement it properly. So many lives would be positively impacted by the change from poor energy efficiency to a cleaner energy source.
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