Explore how buildings from the past can be modified for an energy efficient future, with William Temple
Joshua VARGAS
Welcome to the second full episode of URBANovation, a podcast on innovative ideas for emerging cities in Asia. In the quest for more sustainable cities, we often think about how to increase our cities’ supply of clean energy, but it is also important to make our cities use less energy. This episode is about energy retrofit, modifying existing buildings to become more energy efficient. Our guest is William Temple, CEO of Ampotech, a climate tech company in Singapore using AI to make energy retrofits work for Southeast Asia. This is URBANovation.
[opening music]
Dao NGUYEN
You’re listening to the URBANovation Podcast, a podcast on innovative ideas for emerging cities in Asia. My name is Dao, one of your co-hosts, and I’m here with my co-host Joshua.
Joshua VARGAS
Hi, I’m Joshua. I’m an urbanist and data scientist from the Philippines, and I’m also proud to co-present this podcast.
Dao NGUYEN
In this episode, we are going to run through a couple of key things: energy retrofitting urban areas, we will talk about definition, function and operation of energy retrofit. And later we will try to put energy retrofit into the Southeast Asian context, which is very unique and distinct compared to the rest of the other regions in the world. And last, we will talk about how to engage communities and young people in urban energy retrofit. So today we welcome our guest speaker William Temple. He is the CEO and co-founder of Ampotech, with more than twelve years in Southeast Asia working on energy and climate. with more than twelve years in Southeast Asia working on energy and climate. Hello William.
William TEMPLE
Thank you. It’s great to be on.
Dao NGUYEN
just want to talk a little bit about your company. So Ampotech provides AI-enabled Internet of Things solutions for energy management, with a headquarters in Singapore. Your company focuses on the built environment and energy intensive industries in Asia with a support investor base in different parts of Southeast Asia like Singapore, Vietnam and Asia. So you are the perfect guest speaker for our episode on energy retrofit in the region. So to kick off our podcast, to warm up a little bit, let’s talk about our background, because it’s interesting to me. So you’re American, with more than a decade of working experience in Singapore, in different roles, academia and then later, private sector. Why did you decide to come to work in Southeast Asia and what made you stay here for so long?
William TEMPLE
Yeah, it’s a good question. So I did grow up in the US and I, studied mechanical engineering and I focused on energy systems. So I figured out as an undergraduate that I really wanted to work in the energy industry because I felt like the energy transition was sort of the major challenge of my lifetime. As you know, entire industries and economies had to confront how to transition from fossil fuels to a more sustainable future. I didn’t really know what that would look like until a little bit later in my career, but after I finished graduate school, I wanted to experience working outside of the US just because I thought it would be interesting, and it would be something that would give me a broader perspective. And I happened to know a number of people from my college who were from Southeast Asia and Singapore in particular. And so I had visited and I was a little bit familiar with Singapore. I knew it was English speaking. I knew it was a hub in Southeast Asia. And so it seemed like a good place to move and try working somewhere new and somewhere interesting. And, you know, I’ve been here now for, I guess, more than 13 years. So I turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life to come out to Southeast Asia.
Dao NGUYEN
Awesome, awesome. Yeah, I think it resonated with me a lot because I grew up in Europe as well. And then I came to us in the UK to study for my undergraduate master degree. And then I feel like Southeast Asia is in a really interesting phase, where there are so many things that you can explore as well. So just to follow up on your question, so your company Ampotech focuses on the nexus of AI technology and energy. I’m just curious about what makes you focus on this nexus of two very important topics in Southeast Asia.
William TEMPLE
Yeah. So, you know, before launching Ampotech, I was working in a research center. So it was part of the University of Illinois. And that center specifically focused on the smart power grid and sort of energy management topics as well as AI. So I had a lot of exposure through my colleagues to a lot of these topics, which were still very nascent, and they weren’t really widely adopted in industry yet. This was maybe ten years ago. And so, you know, I thought there was real potential to bring that technology into the built environment and into the energy industry, particularly in Southeast Asia, where we didn’t see a lot of activity at that time. You know, compared to Europe and North America, where maybe there were some startups and a little more activity commercially. And, so we spun off this company, myself and my co-founder, and, you know, the rest is history. We’ve been operating for coming up on ten years now. We operate in multiple markets. So yeah, it’s been a good run so far.
Dao NGUYEN
So let’s take a step back a little bit and talk about like the very first topic, which is energy retrofitting urban areas. So I also study a little bit about energy. And then like I think generally there’s a rising demand of energy in Southeast Asia, particularly for urban development as well, because that you see we focus more on the urban areas and that, part of it is driven by the rapid urbanization, economic growth, also increasing industrialization across Southeast Asia. And according to a report of the International Energy Agency, so electricity demand in Southeast Asia, roughly, it’s set to surge at the annual rate of 4%, which is very high compared to other regions in the world. So with your operations and experience in Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia, which are the three very large markets in Southeast Asia, to what extent do you think the Southeast Asia cities is ready to adopt energy retrofit?
William TEMPLE
Well, I think I think it’s definitely ready, but I think with energy retrofit and energy efficiency technology, what you see everywhere in the world is that adoption is uneven. So you’ll have some properties which are, you know, adopting technology, or they’re taking certain design decisions at the construction stage to be more efficient or more sustainable. But then you have kind of leaders and laggards, right? Because it depends on the owner. It depends on a lot of factors. One of the things that I think is very interesting about Southeast Asia is that there’s so much new development that’s happening here. So you have a real opportunity to influence design standards and best practices and get things right on day one, where in other parts of the world, you know, you have a lot of very, very old, you know, properties which present different challenges and it can be harder to make improvements there. So I think Southeast Asia has a lot of potential, particularly when we talk about, urban planning, urban development, you know, sort of establishing those regulations and best practices and then making a real impact, to potentially leapfrog some of the older cities that you find in other parts of the world when it comes to sustainability.
Dao NGUYEN
So you have talked about some advantages of having energy retrofit in Southeast Asia. I’m wondering about what are the key problems, especially like the problems that you encounter in your work also in daily life as well, when it comes to energy retrofit.
William TEMPLE
So I’ll start with how I became interested in this area. So when I came to Singapore, I worked for a mini consulting company. So, you know, these are the engineering consultants that are engaged to design the electrical systems, the air conditioning systems for new buildings. And so when I was doing that job, what you end up doing at that planning stage is you rely a lot on sort of rules of thumb and sort of assumptions around how you size up the different mechanical and electrical systems in the building. And so you’re going to make assumptions about how many people are going to be using this particular floor of the building. You know, how much electrical equipment is there going to be and how much heat is that going to generate? So how big does my air conditioning system have to be? And so there ends up being a lot of assumptions made. And it becomes sort of, you know, add a 10% safety margin here, add another 10% on top of that. And what you end up having is a very oversized, over-specified system, which is usually, you know, it makes sense because you don’t want to build something that is underpowered from a cooling perspective. But what that means in practice is that oftentimes the systems that are put in place in these buildings are kind of not fit for purpose in the sense that they’re oversize or they’re cooling too much. And so that experience, you know, being on that side of things from the planning and the design perspective, made me interested in how we could use technology to try to improve the operations once the building is built and once it’s operating, how do you try to make it more intelligent and more kind of responsive to what’s actually happening inside? And I think when it comes to retrofits, maybe for those who maybe aren’t familiar with the industry, I think, you know, when you look at a building, you have a lot of core systems. So you have your elevators, you have your air conditioning system, you have your lighting system. You have the water pumps that are serving the, the water for various parts of the building. There’s a lot of equipment that’s there. And so when we look at kind of retrofitting for energy efficiency, you’re usually looking at how you can either control those things in a more intelligent way to make them use less energy or match the actual usage of the building better, or you’re looking at replacing certain equipment, with a newer or more, you know, just intrinsically efficient model. So the perfect example of that would be LED lights. So if you happen to have, you know, fluorescent lights and then you replace them with LEDs, you’re automatically going to save a certain percentage. So there’s different ways you can look at it. And there’s a lot of financial implications and decisions that are made in energy retrofits, because at the end of the day, as an owner, you’re trying to balance that upfront capital expenditure with the operational savings that you’re going to achieve. And so there’s a lot to unpack in this industry about business model, about, you know, how do you select the right equipment or the right initiatives to pursue? And those are all challenges that, you know, businesses have to face.
Joshua VARGAS
So we just heard a bunch of possible approaches towards energy retrofits, from the control of electricity supply to changing how electricity is used to things like LED lights and equipment replacement. And I understand that this is an especially important kind of intervention to make, given how energy demand is one of the biggest problems in the built environment sector. Around the world, buildings account for around 42% of carbon emissions, and 27% of that is from operations, things like lighting, air conditioning that people kind of necessarily rely on. And this has to change. Given the lack of climate progress across the world, The United Nations Environment Program declared this year that no climate progress has been made, no progress made towards our kinds of emissions goals. But I imagine that it must be kind of difficult sometimes, especially when entering a new market, to kind of communicate the value of these kinds of retrofits, both to cities that may not have had an overarching strategy on these things, but also to business owners, property owners who may be kind of mute, these kinds of things. How do you sell them but also convince them about the value such solutions bring, not just for the planet, but also for their own purposes?
William TEMPLE
Yeah. Well, I think, you know, this kind of, I guess, influence or a push for these kind of solutions has different levels to it. So at one level you have kind of the government level or the sort of the national, let’s say standards or codes of practice. So in Singapore you have the Building and Construction Authority, for example, which establishes minimum energy performance standards for different types of buildings. They also have the green building certification scheme called Green Mark, which has different levels. In the US you have LEED, which is, you know, an optional green building standard. So a part of this is to, you know, you want to influence those decision makers about putting in place these types of standards so that there’s at least a baseline for the industry of what should be expected in terms of technology or in terms of energy benchmarks. Then once you have that, you look at the organizations themselves. So generally what you will find is that larger sort of corporations tend to be more proactive about addressing this issue for their own kind of corporate governance and sustainability reasons. So if you have a Fortune 500 company or a publicly listed company, they would probably have some sort of sustainability target or KPI at the organizational level, which means that if they have properties in Asia, you know, they’re going to be establishing the same types of systems or the same types of practices that they would have in Europe or in the US. And so as a company, you know, we would always look to those types of organizations as early adopters in Asia. But I do think in a way there’s more of an opportunity to try to reach another type of company, which is maybe the more local companies or say, midsize, where they don’t necessarily have that strong mandate to do it today. But if you can present them with the right opportunity, the right business case, you know, the right kind of offer to fit their needs. It’s an open market in a lot of ways, because you know, everybody knows that the big corporations need to adopt these technologies and so what a lot of vendors do is that they just target the big corporate clients, and so, you know, it’s a strategic decision as a business, do you want to focus on those clients? who already are qualified, in a sense to adopt these solutions? Or do you want to try to make inroads with that next tier of customer who maybe you need to invest a little more time to educate them, maybe you need to do a little more handholding, but maybe there’s a potentially significant payoff to doing that.
Joshua VARGAS
I see, I see, I mean, it’s so fascinating. And you have so many questions on the bigger picture issues such as how do you kind of translate these things to an environment? What do those benchmarks kind of look like? But I want to take a step back and help our viewer imagine, what this kind of business, what this kind of intervention actually looks like. Could you give a kind of walk through when you’re entering a project? What does that look like? How does Ampotech think about enabling this kind of systems change in that context?
William TEMPLE
We really start with data, I think, because one of the things that we find is- especially compared to maybe North America, where there tends to be a lot of publicly available data from governments and from larger companies, it’s pretty challenging to find accurate data about, you know, building energy performance or benchmarks. There’s just not as much data publicly available in Southeast Asia. And so what we do is, especially with older properties, whether they’re commercial buildings or factories or whatever the usage may be, we usually start with data collection and understanding. So if you’re a real estate developer or a manufacturer and you want to try to address your energy efficiency, the first thing you need to do is actually understand what your baseline consumption is and where your energy is going today. And so we try to create kind of a multi-step journey for the customer, where we can start with a relatively affordable and simple data collection system so they can understand, you know, how much is their total usage, how much is going for air conditioning, how much is going for, say, manufacturing equipment, and how much is for other things. And this helps them to get a benchmark and an understanding of where they are relative to best practices or standards, as well as to kind of similar types of buildings that we have in our data set from past experience. Once they have that information, then you start to drill down to the next level, which is what types of technologies or solutions should you be looking for? You know, should it be something with lighting? Should it be something with your HVAC, you know, air conditioning system? Should it be something else? So that’s where you start to get into more involved conversations about the cost of putting in certain equipment or making certain changes. And so we try to be a technology provider that can come in on day one and support the customer through that entire journey of understanding and then implementing solutions and quantifying the benefit and then maintaining that sort of continuous improvement mindset where, you know, you’re always looking for opportunities to reduce your carbon footprint and your energy usage. And, you know, potentially you might want to be reporting that data to, you know, let’s say you have a sustainability reporting or ESG reporting requirement. You need to provide data about your carbon footprint. And so we provide in a way, the foundation for a lot of businesses to build upon with a lot of more complex sustainability solutions.
Joshua VARGAS
Thanks for describing the process which Ampotech goes into these projects. Do you have any interesting stories to share about a project that did not turn out as expected?
William TEMPLE
I mean, there’s always challenges around the conditions on site, so there’s a very wide variability in what you’re going to find in a building because every building is unique, right? Building a new building is a very involved, multi-year project with a lot of stakeholders. And so if I go into a shopping mall that’s 30 years old or 40 years old, it’s going to look very different inside from a ten year old warehouse. So there’s always going to be surprises on the site in terms of maybe the drawings say that this electrical circuit is connected to an air conditioning unit, but it’s actually connected to something else because somebody changed it way back when and didn’t document it. You know, we’ve had challenges accessing different sites. Like if you’re dealing with remote locations, it can be challenging to get in and provide support, especially in very rural areas. And this is one of the things that kind of led us to designing our own devices as well as our own software, because if we control everything about the products, we can support them better and we can remotely monitor them and update them and troubleshoot them better. If we have full control over those, those devices that are in the field. So that’s something that we learned over the years. I guess one of the takeaways is that a lot of the project issues that have come up over the years actually relate to communications. So it it’s more on the network. It’s not so much on the software or the devices themselves. It’s usually like if you’re deep inside of the basement of a building, are you going to be able to get wireless network coverage or, you know, things like that?
Dao NGUYEN
So we talked a lot to set the scene about what is energy retrofit, and also how the situation in Southeast Asia as a region looks like. So I want to zoom in a little bit into like more specific context. So I’m a Vietnamese. And also I know that Ampotech have a branch in Vietnam as well. And then previously you talked about available source of data, technology, and energy benchmarks in different countries and even in different cities. So how do the gap or the differences in these benchmarks, in different context or country, lead to the different approaches and practices in of energy retrofits in, for example, Vietnam and Indonesia compared to Singapore?
William TEMPLE
I think one of the biggest factors when you’re looking at energy efficiency projects is the electricity prices themselves and the structure of electricity pricing. A lot of the Southeast Asian markets have pretty aggressive government subsidies on electricity, and so it’s much more challenging to have, a good payback on a project if you’re talking about, you know, $0.06 or $0.08 a kilowatt hour versus $0.20 or $0.30 a kilowatt hour. So that’s something that is pretty fundamental for the energy retrofit industry, because at the end of the day, if you’re doing an energy retrofit project, you’re doing it to save money, you know, through saving energy. So there’s an environmental aspect, but there’s a cost saving aspect of it, and you need to be able to justify the return on investment. Another difference in benchmarking would be cultural differences, I guess maybe working hours or which days of the week you’re operating. And so that’s just something you would have to take into account when you’re looking at your model is, you know, are we dealing with how many hours a week of operation? And that also feeds into your payback, right? If you’re replacing something or you’re making a change. I mean, there’s a lot of interesting things about transportation, I suppose. For example, I found that Vietnam, the working hours are maybe more regular, at least from my observation, just because the traffic can be so challenging to get to and from where you want to go, that work ends pretty reliably in the evening. Whereas in Singapore, where, you know, maybe it’s easier to stay late at the office or something like that, you have a little more variability in the working hours. And then obviously you’ve got different codes of practice, which just comes about from local regulations. And that’s something you deal with everywhere. But you can’t just take something that works in the US or in Western Europe and just transplant it here. It’s not going to work. A lot of businesses look at that as a challenge, but I see it as an opportunity because there’s a real opportunity for people to create businesses that are in Southeast Asia, for Southeast Asia, and really kind of figuring out how to operate in these markets in a way that, you know, foreign companies can’t really do.
Dao NGUYEN
Yeah, I resonated with what you said about Vietnam because I had been talking to my friends as well, looking at the energy sector in Vietnam. And it is not easy at all, coming from a different perspective and coming from different contexts, even in different city, that had different regulation or benchmark for energy retrofit and energy efficiency as well. That’s why it’s like other things like, available sources of data to the public, although the technological advancement in different cities, and also like compare between Vietnam and other more advanced countries in the region as well. So that leads to my next question. So you talk a lot about the role of government as well, also, like, another stakeholder is the business itself. But I wonder, like in this process of implementing energy retrofit solution in the city, are there any actors that are also involved in the process of making the city more energy efficient.
William TEMPEL
I think when it comes to cities, there’s a lot you can do with urban planning. They talk about the urban heat island effect, right? If you have a lot of high rise buildings, it can lead to an increase in temperature, and that will also impact the energy efficiency of the buildings. One thing that we’ve seen in Singapore and also some of the other regional countries is you see more district cooling systems, which is another thing that can be facilitated, I think, by planning is, you know, how do you make it easier for building owners to have a shared cooling system that can benefit from economies of scale? It’s not easy to do. I’ve seen companies trying to do it in the region. And you, you know, that’s an area where local regulations can be quite challenging to navigate if you’re trying to do something like that. But the potential is there. It’s significant from an energy and sustainability perspective. And then I think one of the policy levers that, I mean, it’s not it’s not that deep really, but subsidies and incentives for property owners to adopt these technologies. I mean, that goes a long way toward helping especially small and mid-sized businesses that don’t have the same budgets as big, big corporations. If you can provide certain subsidies or incentives for them to adopt relatively simple energy retrofit kind of solutions, then that can have a pretty big impact when you scale it up over a large number of properties and a large number of businesses.
Dao NGUYEN
So talking about this from a perspective of a business leader, so there would be like short term and long term planning also benefits as well. So I wonder what are the feasible solution in the short term and long term that will work for the context of Southeast Asia?
William TEMPLE
I think with technology there’s a lot of solutions that are ready now. So one that we touched on earlier is lighting. I mean, there’s no reason that businesses should not be using, you know, highly efficient LED lighting. When it comes to air conditioning controls, there’s a lot of opportunity to adopt better control technology. So if you have a very old property, you might have manually configured thermostats and constant air volume systems, which are just always delivering % cooling whenever they’re on and then they’re off, you know, so there’s a lot of potential there to make some relatively simple upgrades to make the system more responsive and more kind of fine tuned to be able to, you know, provide comfort while not over cooling the space and wasting a lot of energy. Even things like daylight, right? Like how can you try to take advantage of natural light by maybe making some changes to your curtains or putting, you know, light shelves? There’s different kind of low impact things you can do to try to reduce how much electricity you have to use. And then if you look at it from a new construction perspective, then you can look at things like natural ventilation. You can look at, you know, green rooftops or, you know, how do you reduce the amount of heat gain that that gets absorbed into the building? There’s a lot of things that are relatively inexpensive that can be done today for existing buildings, and it really just takes, I think, education. And then maybe for some markets, a little bit of incentive, maybe in the form of rebates or grant funding to try to nudge businesses to adopt some of these things that would have a significant impact.
Joshua VARGAS
As you mentioned, there are many opportunities in the region. And you’ve also mentioned that there have been many challenges. You’ve mentioned previously about the uneven data availability in the region. You’ve also mentioned about the difference in regulatory landscape and even institutions and culture. But I want to flip the script a little bit. Is there something that is kind of easier to do in Southeast Asia compared to European and American cities, and what are some those opportunities that people seeking to do this kind of work in the region, like what kinds of opportunities should be latched on?
William TEMPLE
Interesting question. One opportunity, I suppose, is that in the US, you tend to have large corporations that kind of dominate most of the businesses, right? So, I mean, I think there’s a larger percentage of small and medium enterprises in Southeast Asia. I think this is pretty well known that a lot of the economy is smaller businesses, a lot of them are family owned. And so in a way, you have more customers that you can reach and you have an opportunity to influence customers perhaps more easily than, you know, trying to go and meet, let’s say, McDonald’s, you know, at the corporate level in America. I mean, how many companies are trying to talk to them and trying to get a product in with them? Right. So, I mean, of course, there’s a reason for that because it’s a big account, but I think there’s a lot of opportunity in Southeast Asia to make an impact in a relatively easier way in an organization by organizational manner, where it’s about building the relationship. And then you can reach the decision makers potentially more easily in Southeast Asia, if you have the right connections. I think also, this is not quite a retrofit topic, but there’s just so much new development happening in Southeast Asia that you can have more influence, I think, over what gets built and how it gets built, and you can potentially get your innovative technology into buildings more easily and more quickly just because there are more opportunities, you know, there aren’t that many new projects being developed in these more mature markets in other countries and the construction cycle tends to be longer. You know, building a new building in the US would be more costly and more time consuming than building one in, you know, most of Southeast Asia, I would think. So, basically, like more relationships to build, more people to reach out to.
Joshua VARGAS
I imagine that kind of benefit to working in the region is something that can be a blessing for sure, but also a big challenge. You start out in Singapore, which is a very competitive yet small market where everyone kind of knows each other. And then Ampotech expanded to Vietnam and Indonesia, which are very decentralized countries in terms of like having multiple urban centers and a growing number of secondary cities that are driving economic development. After projected GDP growth between 2015 and 2025, % of that in this region is estimated to come from secondary cities with a population between 200,000 and 5 million. But I guess 5 million is small for Asia, in a way! And I’m wondering if you’ve had experiences kind of like branching out into those, smaller cities where a lot of that rapid development is happening? And what is it like trying to reach out to new markets where the knowledge of these kinds of things and their importance is kind of low, but also you don’t really have that much in the way of competition yet.
William TEMPLE
Yeah, I think the dynamic of kind of the, the mega cities and the other cities that are still developing in Southeast Asia is very interesting. I think I would say a lot of our business is still in Singapore. So we do have, you know, customers and offices regionally, but we’re still in the early stages of that expansion journey out of Singapore. And so for us, we’ve tended to focus on the capital cities, just because that’s kind of the natural landing spot. And there’s more talent if you’re looking to hire people, you know. So there’s reasons that we would want to look there. But a lot of it comes down to where the client is and where the clients facilities are. So in Vietnam, for example, you know, we’re seeing, so our office in Vietnam is in Ho Chi Minh City, but we’re seeing opportunities in Central Vietnam. We’re seeing opportunities in the northern region. So you just have to go where the customer is. And I think in a way, there’s more opportunity coming up in those other regions just because that’s where development is happening more quickly. And in order to access that, I think you have to have a good local presence, right? I mean, you have to have a local team. You have to be well connected with the value chain of contractors or implementation partners locally. And so that’s always been a big part of our model, is we try to work a lot with local partners in the different markets that we go into, because the way business is done in each country is a little bit different, and there’s always going to be kind of local players in the built environment ecosystem in each country that are well connected. And so we try to be, a technology partner and a solution partner that can allow those companies to bring those solutions into their customer base and their network. You know, it’s interesting because I think the more traditional way of scaling up in the US, because it’s a homogenous large market, is you hire a big sales team and you do it yourself, right? You want to own the customer relationship, you want to target the customers yourself and have your own sales team. And so we do have a sales team, and we have people targeting and users, but we also have a significant focus on partnership. And how can we grow with local partners and, you know, find success together. And I think that’s something that is a little bit different than the standard kind of scale up playbook that you’d find in other countries.
Dao NGUYEN
Thank you so much for mentioning the local presence. And then how how do you often work with local partners? So that naturally leads to the last part of the conversation, which is about engaging stakeholders, community and young people in urban energy retrofit. So I read on the website that Ampotech won the ASEAN Energy Efficiency and Conservation Practices award, which is very impressive. So I assume that you and also your colleagues must have experience engaging with policymakers and stakeholders at the ASEAN level and also national and local level as well. So given the gap that we just talked about between Southeast Asian cities and based on your experience as well, what are the best, practices or the best, approach in terms of policy, legal framework, also a mechanism that can streamline multi-stakeholder engagement in energy retrofits?
William TEMPLE
I think that’s an important question. It’s a big question. So I think there’s still a lot of companies and, you know, policymakers and different organizations that are figuring it out. I think one thing that is a bit challenging about this particular industry is that there’s just so many different stakeholders, right? I mean, you have the policymakers in the relevant departments dealing with construction and permitting and energy. Then you’ve got your real estate developers, you’ve got your operators and facilities management companies. Then you’ve got a bunch of different vendors and consultants. And so I think one thing is getting these different people to talk and meet and creating communities where they can exchange ideas and find what those best practices are and find ways to reduce friction, because it’s always challenging to go through many different layers to get a project done. And so as much as possible, if there’s a way to create consensus or create best practices and standards around how to do something, that would be something that would help everybody. This is something that just comes from having the right working groups, the right events, the right, you know, networking opportunities. That’s something we’re seeing more, I think in the region there’s more awareness, there’s more community around sustainability. In the roughly ten years that I’ve been running this business, we’ve seen such a surge in awareness and interest in this topic. I mean, there’s so many more students that are coming out of colleges and universities, and they’re looking to work in a sustainability related field or, you know, they’re interested in internships. And so I can see that there’s a real change that’s happening, and there’s a lot of people who are looking for a way to make an impact somehow. And I think it’s great. And whether those people decide to go into the private sector or a government agency, there’s always a need for, you know, passionate, energetic people that can, you know, try to solve problems and try to break down barriers and try to make a better world for everybody, ultimately.
Joshua VARGAS
That’s a perfect segue, really, to our closing question. I mean, before we get to that, really, I wanted to say that your own background resonated a lot with me because as we discussed when we first connected, I actually currently work in the same research tower where William kind of started out in Singapore. And Singapore’s R&D ecosystem is very exciting. There’s so much energy, there’s so many resources, and it’s also, growing encouragement for people to spin off that research and pursue entrepreneurship and to translate that work into the real world. It’s really interesting hearing how you kind of found your way to do that. What is your advice to young people in the region who are indeed coming to those universities, and they’re trying to find different kinds of ways to make the impact they want to make on the sustainability field, regardless of their background? Is there one right way to do it?
William TEMPLE
No, I think there’s a lot of avenues to do it. But what I would suggest for a young person who is maybe, you know, still in school or graduating soon is it’s important to try a number of different roles and different industries when you’re young. Right? So if you can do internships or you can try spending 1 or 2 years at a few different companies when you’re still in your early 20s, it’s very useful to have exposure to different topics. So for me, you know, I studied mechanical engineering, so I was comfortable with thermodynamics and energy systems and product design. But then when I went to graduate school, I studied electrical engineering. I was looking at the power grid, and how do you integrate renewable energy resources and electric vehicles and, you know, more of a power system economics. And so that was a great kind of complementary piece of knowledge. And then I moved to the research center where, you know, I had never worked with IT, computer science people before. But now I’m learning from, you know, AI data scientists and, you know, embedded systems engineers who are designing sensors. So over time, you accumulate a lot of different pieces of knowledge, and then eventually you’ll find problems where the pieces come together and you can make a difference with your particular expertise and your passion. And you have a unique skill set and a unique perspective. Right? So I always think of it as I want to have at least 2 or 3 areas where I have, you know, let’s say like top 10 or 20% knowledge in a certain topic. And then instead of trying to be like % in one, you know, if you can put together a couple of areas where you’re pretty knowledgeable or have some good experience, then you can find unique opportunities where the combination of those skills are going to be very valuable. So that’s what I think young people should do in their career around sustainability is maybe try working in a startup and then try working in a government agency, and then you’re going to find a lot of areas where you can help those two types of organizations work together better.
Joshua VARGAS
Thanks so much for spending the time with us, William, and it was great to hear about your journey and Ampotech.
William TEMPLE
Thanks a lot! It was a good chat and thanks for having me.
Dao NGUYEN
We come to the end of our conversation today. So thank you, William, for sharing your thoughts and experience as a business leader in the energy sector in Southeast Asia. And we do hope that our listeners enjoyed our conversation with William like we did. We will meet again, you know, next episode with other guest speakers, but have a nice day. Bye bye, everyone!
[closing music]
Dao NGUYEN
URBANovation is hosted by the Young Urbanists of Southeast Asia, or YUSEA. To learn more about us, please visit our website at yusea.org. URBANovation is made possible with the support of Bai Xian Asia Institute 2024 Project Award.
Hosts: Dao Nguyen, Joshua Vargas
Research: Dao Nguyen
Post-production: Joshua Vargas
Communications: Joshua Vargas, Dao Nguyen (URBANovation Team), Kanesia Tahira, Nguyen Mau Duc Binh (YUSEA Communications)
Music: Joshua Vargas
Image credits: Insung Yoon/Unsplash
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