One question, asked in different places
Aloe Energy began with a simple observation: the places that most need reliable power are often the last to get it, while useful equipment ends up in landfills. Here is how that idea has grown, from a village in southern Zambia to labs in the United States and back to Zambia again.
Where it started
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2018 - 2020 · Kalomo, Zambia
Peace Corps: seeing energy poverty up close
As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kalomo District, Southern Province, Brandon Simons worked with rural farmers on fish farming and other income-generating activities, running workshops in Chitonga. Alongside that he installed a solar system for a rural community school and designed a solar maize mill, a solar milk chiller and solar borehole piping. It showed him how much a little reliable power changes daily life, and how often systems fail when batteries wear out.
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2021
Solar cooking with SolarBuddy and Engineering for Change
As an Engineering for Change research fellow, Brandon worked with the charity SolarBuddy to design a 1,000 watt solar electric cooking system with lithium batteries for rural households in Papua New Guinea and Madagascar.
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2021
A call to action from Fiji
The humanitarian group Field Ready noticed that nearly half the cars in Fiji were used Toyota Priuses, and that thousands of their worn-out batteries were stacking up in warehouses and landfills. They put out a global call: could these batteries power homes on islands with no electricity? Brandon took it on as his master's research at Villanova University.
The battery years
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May 2022
The thesis
Working with donated modules and advisors at Villanova's Center for Humanitarian Engineering, Brandon tested 62 used Prius battery modules and rebuilt the good ones into packs sized for one rural home. The packs delivered a full day of basic power. Read how it worked.
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2022
Published through IEEE
The research was published at the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC 2022) as The repurposing of nickel metal hydride hybrid electric vehicle batteries for solar energy storage applications in rural Pacific Island communities.
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August 2022
Aloe Energy is founded
To take the research beyond the lab, Brandon co-founded Aloe Energy. The idea: test, grade and rebuild used batteries locally, creating jobs and small businesses while keeping toxic waste out of the ground. The Fiji pilot was later set aside, but the waste-to-wealth idea carried on.
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2022 - 2023
MIT Sandbox
Aloe Energy took part in the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund, MIT's program for early-stage ventures, across its fall 2022, spring 2023 and summer 2023 cohorts. With mentors, the team worked on the business model and market research, and mapped out how faster battery testing and machine learning could make grading practical at scale.
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2022 - 2024 · California
Second-life EV batteries at ReJoule
At the battery start-up ReJoule, Brandon built grading procedures for used electric vehicle batteries and machine-learning tools to match modules into new packs that age evenly. He worked on a California Energy Commission project reusing about 1 MWh of EV batteries as storage for microgrids in Southern California.
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2023
Second-life solar with SolarBuddy
With SolarBuddy, Aloe Energy contributed to Community Buddy, a concept for small solar mini-grids built from retired but working solar panels, with income returned to a community trust. Research covered sites in Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Niue.
Back in Zambia
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2024 - 2025 · Lusaka
Rural electric cooperatives and national policy
With NRECA International, Brandon supported five rural electric cooperatives in Zambia through one of the worst droughts in decades, including the design and construction of a set of mini-grids. He served on Zambia's Off-Grid Task Force, advising on electrification resilience, e-waste management, circular economy, climate finance and GIS energy planning.
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Today · North-Western Zambia
Building rural grids, and bringing Aloe back
Brandon now leads energy infrastructure development in North-Western Zambia: helping shape a large grid-expansion and rural electrification program alongside the national utility and government, and managing new solar and mini-grid projects for a rural utility that works hand in hand with the national grid. He also supports policy dialogue on distributed utilities and rural energy regulation.
Much of it is energy planning: mapping customers and feeders in QGIS, estimating demand and working out where the grid, mini-grids and solar each fit best.
That work sits right where Aloe Energy now focuses: how grid-connected mini-grids, distributed energy and good planning can strengthen weak rural grids, giving solar panels and batteries a second life, and following e-mobility batteries through their whole life cycle.
"A general passion for waste-to-wealth, especially when it comes to creating income generating activities for vulnerable populations while solving environmental issues."
Brandon Simons, founder