How one woman helped reshape energy storage in Norfolk
Norfolk: When Tania Saxby joined Connected Energy in 2019, fresh out of university, she was the only woman in the company. “It was quite a blokey environment,” she recalls with a smile. Based in Norfolk, home to sports car maker Lotus, CE was filled with ex-Lotus engineers and software specialists. “They were keen on motor sports, tinkering with their cars at weekends.”
Saxby says the team made her very welcome, but being a woman in the sector was still something of a novelty.
Today, Connected Energy is changing more than its office culture. The company specialises in repurposing electric vehicle batteries to store energy. It takes ‘second life’ EV batteries, ones that no longer have enough capacity to power cars but can still hold plenty of energy, and combines them into giant power packs.
Those packs now provide on-site electricity for data centres and other high-demand users, often paired with local solar. Increasingly, they play a role in energy trading too: buying surplus power from the grid when it’s cheap, storing it, and selling it back when prices rise.
The sustainability upside is clear. CE turns a potential waste problem, a hefty spent battery, into a key component of the fast-growing renewable energy system.
For Saxby, the shift has been personal and professional. Five years on, she’s part of a team tackling two challenges at once: cutting e-waste and stabilizing green power. “Back then, I was the only woman,” she says. “Now we’re building something that didn’t exist before. That’s the real novelty.”
