Sarah Moses (MSIT ’26) grew up in South Sudan and Kenya where her community, and many others, had limited or no access to electricity. As an engineering student looking back on this experience, she wanted to understand ways to overcome the issues that developers face when trying to build energy infrastructure on the continent.
Her first step was to dive into the topic of electricity generation. She signed up for the course “Integrated Energy Systems,” taught by Jesse Thornburg, assistant teaching professor and principal investigator in the Energy with AI Lab at CMU-Africa.
“In a class of electrical engineering students, Sarah was the only person pursuing a Master of Science in Information Technology,” Thornburg said. “With her undergraduate background in computer science, she brought a different perspective: viewing large-scale power generation projects through the lens of artificial intelligence (AI).”
Moses homed in on the step-by-step process that developers follow. She saw an opportunity to use AI to lower costs and save time in this process, starting with the prefeasibility study.
“The prefeasibility study is the critical first step developers take to prove the viability of the project and secure funding. Unfortunately, it can take months to years to do a study, and thousands of dollars, even on the low end,” explains Thornburg. “Besides barriers such as the cost of the study and the time it takes, there are also issues related to lack of data or uncertainty about data’s reliability.”
