Finding a way

To kick off 2024, a story of an SME that's doing good things in building diversity and competence among the renewable energy trades.

We hear and read much about the favourability of women for senior sustainability roles and can examine the evidence for gender equality in Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) positions around the world. Sustainable Tech Partner, for example, contains 285 women in its 527 ‘CSO’s to know’ list (we counted). But it’s sometimes difficult to look down through the ranks (if ‘down’ is the right word) and get a feel for how gender equality is shaping up among the folk who are actually out there doing all this good sustainability work. We’re talking here about the people who are fitting the solar panels and heat pumps, maintaining the wind turbines and such like, perhaps under the radar of all the would-be thought leaders (of which there are many) and into the realm of what we might term action leadership.

We were afforded a brief glimpse into a corner of this world a few weeks before Christmas, when we had an illuminating conversation with Leah Robson, founder of Your Energy Your Way (YEYW).

YEYW is a designer and installer of whole-house renewable energy solutions, based in Surrey and operating across South-East England. Heat pumps – ground and air source – solar PV panels, solar thermal batteries, EV chargers, you name it. From the whole retrofit piece where people have bought a house and want to extend it, improve the insulation, have it rewired, change the heating system and stick on some solar panels all as part of one big project, to stand alone jobs involving perhaps just one piece of renewable kit like, perhaps, a Tesla Powerwall. Commercial work too, with the Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS) quality accreditation to back it up.

Advice is very much part of the remit, starting with the suitability of a property for renewable technology in the first place. Leah tells us YEYW has turned away a few potential customers who don’t have enough of the ‘fabric first’ basics in place and adds, “We say to anyone with single glazing that a heat pump is not appropriate. They need their loft insulated and cavity walls filled in order to get a Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant, and that feels like a pretty sensible minimum. We do still install heat pumps in uninsulated houses because they still work, but it's just a case of explaining to people what the running costs will be”.

Leah describes her personal route into the renewables business. After a former career in management consulting and casting around after having her family for something a bit different, she talked her way into a job with the company that had fitted her solar panels – this was around the time of the Green Deal (remember that?). Expecting to be working more on the sales side, Leah found herself being quickly pulled into the deep end of installation and project management, which she describes as a scary but brilliant way to learn. She adds, “Heat pumps were quite new for everybody, so there was a lot of help available and particular distributors were happy to give advice and help me along the along the learning journey”.

After five or so years, Leah parted company to set up Your Energy Your Way. She describes the reason for that: “I accidentally ended up in this business, which I think is quite common for a lot of people, particularly for the women I meet. And over those five years, I had been quite depressed by the low number of women that I'd met on site. They were either the cleaners, cleaning up when the project finished, or the interior designers [Ed.: remember our post on Yellow?], or sometimes the architects. But I didn't really meet any other female trades. They're fantastic jobs and there are lots of them, so it seems ridiculous to have a good 50% of the population either ruling themselves out or being ruled out”.

Asking around, she found that it was tricky for many would-be builders, plumbers or electricians to find a route in without an uncle or a cousin or a friend of the family to help. Often the contacts being passed around were somebody's son rather than daughter. And, with a predominantly white working community, this also contributed to a lack of ethnic diversity.

This, then, became one of the key motivations for setting up Your Energy Your Way CIC. And, while not as exclusively female as the wonderfully-named Stopcocks franchise of women plumbers, YEYW is listed in the Register of Tradeswomen and is, in its own words, ‘committed to promoting opportunities for women in construction [by] training and supporting female apprentices entering the construction industry and gaining skills in renewable energy specifically.’

Leah explains, though, that bringing in trainees was not the original intention. Building synergies with organisations like the aforementioned Stopcocks was the first plan. But YEYW found itself simply offering extra work to women who were committed to working locally and already had plenty of work, thank you. In other cases – like finding an insulation contractor in whom they could confidently recommend to customers – the task was beginning to look too difficult. So, the decision to train its own people became the best option.

But, here’s the rub. In today’s apprenticeship-centric system, how does an ambitious but resource-constrained SME fund its own training, while ensuring – as far as it is able – some sort of payback on its investment once its trainees are trained up and competent? Trainees may be offered some form of retention agreement, but remember, apprentices aren’t tied in any way – and in any case, at the time YEYW was setting this up in the first half of 2023, IfATE’s Low Carbon Technician apprenticeship wasn’t even released yet.

After talking to an array of charities and government departments, and not being able to tick all the various boxes to qualify for grant support, the answer became crowdfunding. So, with £250k raised in fixed rate bonds from Ethex and with a grant from Samsung in return from some promotional opportunities, YEYW now has five female trainees who, Leah tells us, “…are doing everything that we do. They are out on site helping to fit solar panels, looking over the shoulder of qualified electricians, learning about plumbing and heating systems, and heat pumps. No doubt they will go and get some qualifications at a later point. But right now they are working on the job and learning as much as they possibly can”.

For their efforts, the trainees are receiving Living Wage, a fair whack more than apprenticeship rates. But there’s a good reason for this: as Leah explains, bringing in trainees with more diversity generally meant getting them slightly later in life, not straight from GCSEs and not still living at home with their parents. She also found that some of the trainees had already been trying to find a route into the industry, one via an online electrician’s course “where you just sit at home and watch lectures and eventually, they might get you in to do some things with cables”, and another through a similar thing on the plumbing front.

YEYW’s training scheme is being supervised and monitored by BetaTeach, run by Nathan Gambling, who we know from conversations we’ve had in relation to our work at City & Guilds. Nathan is a fount of all Heat knowledge, and Leah tells us that her trainees meet with him once a fortnight and review what they've been doing out on site. They’re also on Nathan’s learning platform, interacting with it to self-guide their learning with his oversight. Leah comments, “We're trying to do some different things around training, really, to see what works and what we can do to try and alter this diversity balance.

“And hopefully it also provides some lessons for other people wanting to come into these kind of trades.”

We think Your Energy Your Way’s story is one worth telling. We see action and initiative by an SME with sustainability-minded individuals at the helm, building competences for the Net Zero transition in an almost guerilla-type way. It also reminds us that sustainability is not just about the environment; it’s also about social equity and, ultimately, it has to comply with the rules of economics, investment, and payback.

But it also indicates where the great and the good of government and big education can help. A couple of thoughts spring to mind.

First, in a practical sense to pull together, complement, and accredit the type of on-the-ground training that YEYW – and, no doubt, others – are developing. As Leah said to us, “Nobody's quite done this before. We're not guaranteeing that [our trainees] are going to get a qualification, but they will be fully competent. Our guys are out there with them on site nine days out of ten, with the tenth in the classroom. They're getting really good experience, not just standing in the doorway passing the spanner.”

Second, to find a way to bring more diversity into some of the trades that are critical for Net Zero. This is not just about what thought leaders refer to as a ‘Just Transition’. This is more about getting all hands to the pumps – heat and others. Again, to quote Leah Robson, “It’s just crazy that there are so many good jobs out there and so few people being able to access them.”

We hope we can continue to tell more stories like this as we progress into 2024. Happy New Year!