By David Adebiyi, CTO, PowerLabs
Every morning, across thousands of businesses in Lagos, the first decision of the day has nothing to do with customers, strategy, or product. It has to do with electricity. Is there power from the grid? How much diesel is left in the generator? Can we afford to run it for a full shift, or do we ration? These questions come before the shop opens, before the factory floor hums, before the first email is sent. They come before everything, because without an answer, there is nothing.
In software engineering, there is a concept called a dependency, i.e., something your system needs in order to function. Dependencies form trees. Your application depends on a framework, which depends on a runtime, which depends on an operating system, which depends on hardware. If any node in the tree fails, the nodes above it fail too. The lower you go, the more catastrophic the outcome when it breaks.
Electricity is not this tree. It is beneath it. It is the ground the tree is planted on. In mathematical convention, when something precedes the first element, we call it zeroth. Energy is the zeroth dependency – the one so fundamental that it is rarely written down, almost never analysed with the seriousness it deserves, and only noticed when it disappears.
