Distributed renewables in Africa

Co-founder of CrossBoundary Group Matthew Tilleard speaks with Nathan Scolaro about how distributed renewables are reshaping energy access across Africa—and what Australia can learn from it.

From Melbourne to Nairobi, from Afghanistan’s ministries to remote villages in Madagascar, Matthew Tilleard has built a career at the intersection of climate action and global development. Originally from Australia, he holds degrees in law and science from the University of Melbourne, an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School and an MBA from Stanford University, where he studied as a Fulbright Scholar.

Before co-founding the CrossBoundary Group, he helped design financing facilities in Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, worked within the UN Secretary-General’s office, with Noel Pearson’s Cape York Institute and as a strategy consultant at The Boston Consulting Group. Today, as a managing partner of CrossBoundary Group, he oversees one of Africa’s largest distributed renewable utilities, deploying solar and storage mini-grids across the continent, and has recently opened an office in Perth to bring that expertise back to Australia’s mining and off-grid sectors.

NATHAN SCOLARO: You’re an Australian who has worked and studied at some of the world’s top institutions, and now you’re in Nairobi, Kenya. I’m curious, how has your career led you there?

MATTHEW TILLEARD: I grew up in Gippsland in Sale, went to uni in Melbourne and worked at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in Melbourne. But from an early age I had a real interest in sustainability—that’s where I wanted to spend my time. My dad was an environmental engineer and he had this project in Vietnam. I went with him on one of his work trips and that reshaped my perspective. I’d been thinking, “We’ve got to save the planet—that’s the main thing.” And then seeing poverty for the first time, the massive difference between the life of an average Australian and the life of somebody in Vietnam, I was like, “Okay, we have two big problems here. I want to spend my career working on both sustainability and development.”

I worked at the UN as an intern in East Timor and realised the UN is a great organisation, but not for me. I was a little too in a hurry. So I went to the private sector at BCG to get that toolkit, then went to work with Noel Pearson in Cape York for a year, and later in Afghanistan with the British government. That period really put me through the wringer, but it also clarified the shared reason for failure that I was seeing.

What was that shared reason?

If you want to make positive change, you don’t parachute in with a great PowerPoint deck and a perfect plan and then just roll it out. You don’t go to Afghanistan and say, “Okay, we need you to be Denmark. Here’s the 20,000-page manual.” Real change responds to context and what people actually want. If you walked into Afghanistan in 2001 and set up a democracy shop, you might do okay for a few years because people were curious. But by 2006 or 2009, you’d be going out of business—because people didn’t want what you were selling. The same thing applies in Indigenous Australia.

Tell us more about that year you spent working with Noel Pearson in Cape York. What did that involve?

I was working at the Cape York Institute. BCG had a program where they seconded people up there and I extended my secondment into a year. We were helping Noel with writing policy proposals. He’s a fascinating guy, obviously, and incredibly—just a genius in terms of his intellect. But it’s an intractable problem there, or I guess just everywhere. What Noel was trying to get across to government at the time, and what I saw firsthand in Afghanistan, is that we often show up with a sensible plan on paper and try to impose it, rather than figuring out the next proximate step that actually improves lives in a way that people want.

So that’s what led you back to the private sector?

Exactly. The private sector is disciplined by context. If I can’t find something you want to buy, I go out of business. You have to finance something people actually want. That responsiveness and humility makes the private sector a powerful tool for change.

And then there’s scalability. If you really want to make a difference, you can only get so far before you need your solution to make business sense. What’s exciting now with renewables, we simply have a better product than the fossil alternative. Some customers care about climate change, some don’t, but solar and storage are just cheaper. When you hit that point, capital flows and everything opens up. You can scale in a way a grant-funded or not-for-profit model can’t.

And so how did the CrossBoundary Group come to be?

My co-founders and I started it while we were at graduate school in the US. I was doing a government degree at Harvard and an MBA at Stanford. We started CrossBoundary Group as an investment firm focused on bringing capital into underserved markets.

Over time, the group has built a number of businesses in sectors where we saw an opportunity to build better conditions for sustainable development. I spend most of my time on our renewables businesses, CrossBoundary Energy and CrossBoundary Access. CrossBoundary Energy is a distributed renewable utility serving business: we put solar and storage on the sites of commercial and industrial customers and sell them power. We have close to a billion dollars of awarded customer contracts now—half of that is already built or in construction—which makes us a significant utility on the continent.

CrossBoundary Access uses the same technologies to bring power to communities. There are over 600 million people in Africa without access to electricity so this is a huge opportunity. Both speak to those two motivations I had from the start: sustainability and development.

Before we dive further into the business, how did Africa become your base?

If you’re interested in sustainable development, Africa is the place to be. It’s the largest concentration of people still being left behind. Southeast Asia and Latin America have seen a lot of growth; Africa still has the biggest gap.

We started doing work here, and Nairobi became our biggest office in 2015. I was flying in from New York, but it felt weird to sit in Manhattan and do calls in my pyjamas when our theory of change is about being connected to the ground. So I moved here around 2016 or 2017—almost 10 years ago now.

Kenya is a really exciting ecosystem. The infrastructure is good, it’s relatively easy to live here compared to some contexts, and there’s this cosmopolitan, open society. It attracts talented people from all over the world who want to work on the problems and opportunities around sustainable development. It’s a real hub for innovation in East Africa.

And a place where you could have the impact you wanted?

Yeah. The core reason to be here is just the gap. Interestingly, mining has been one of our biggest client segments on the continent, because demand for minerals is going through the roof with the energy transition—copper, graphite, all the critical minerals. Those companies have been early movers on sustainability.

Because of that expertise, we’ve now opened an office in Perth. We’ve spent years building renewable baseload systems in very tough contexts like southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and we’re interested in bringing that capability back to Australia. Mining is a good place to start. It’s obviously less about development impact here, though there’s interesting work to do with Indigenous communities, but it still hits the sustainability point.

Let’s talk about that expertise. How is Africa leapfrogging to a distributed renewable future?

Africa often follows the rest of the world, but in energy, it’s doing something different because of the huge infrastructure gap. If you start a business in Melbourne, you don’t think twice about reliable, reasonably priced power. But here you have 600 million people without electricity. That number gets thrown around a lot, but the scale is wild—600 million is two Americas.

What that means is you don’t have legacy systems that kind of work, so you leapfrog straight to the new model. The same thing happened with mobile phones. In Australia, everyone had copper landlines, so mobile adoption was slower. In Africa, most people had no phone access, so the first phone they ever got was mobile. Entire generations skipped the landline era. The same thing is happening with solar and batteries.

How so?

Solar and storage behave like technology, not fuel. That’s the key. The more you make, the cheaper they get. They’re like computer chips, not oil and gas. Oil and gas don’t radically drop in price; solar and storage do.

People have understood that first part—the falling cost curves. But the second part is even more important: economies of scale happen at the manufacturing point, not at installation. So building a one-gigawatt solar plant isn’t dramatically cheaper per kilowatt than building a one-megawatt plant.

And delivering electricity is 50% of the cost. If you generate on site, you avoid that cost. So you end up with millions of distributed nodes—generation, storage and consumption—rather than big, centralised plants sending power out to everyone. Africa is skipping the old grid and going straight to that model.

Can you give an example?

In the DRC, the largest copper mine in Africa and third-largest in the world is shifting to renewable baseload. That’s always been the critique of renewables: “You can’t provide baseload.” But we’re providing 30 megawatts of firm supply. To do that, we’re building 200MW of solar and a little over 500MWh of batteries. To put that in perspective, Elon Musk’s big South Australia battery was around 200MWh. This single customer system is bigger.

We’re not guaranteeing 100% availability; we could, but solar and battery don’t make economic sense for the very last 3 to 4% because you have to size for the worst day of the year. But for most of the year, it’s baseload renewables in one of the hardest places in the world to operate.

And then there’s the community side of what we do through CrossBoundary Access. Using the same technologies to bring power to rural communities. If you live 10 to 15 kilometres from the grid, which is where most of the 600 million people without electricity live, it’s cheaper to connect you to a solar-battery mini grid than to run a transmission line out to you.

It creates these incredibly resilient distributed grids. Solar panels in the centre of the village, a big battery, everyone connected. People pay with mobile money. And all these micro-enterprises can emerge—cold drinks in fridges, electric rice milling instead of using old tractor engines, and always a disco. There’s always a disco.

We finance the assets and partner with local developers to operate them. It’s early days but extremely impactful.

You mentioned that a lot of the renewable uptake in Africa isn’t showing up in typical statistics. Why is that?

If you looked only at utility-scale solar selling electricity to governments or national utilities, Africa wouldn’t look particularly impressive. But if you look at import levels of panels and batteries, it’s completely off the hook.

Countries like Nigeria, which barely have any utility-scale solar, are flooded with small-scale solar panels and batteries. People are buying panels, buying batteries and going semi-off-grid without waiting for government programs. It’s happening behind the scenes, in ways that traditional statistics don’t capture.

And then you have these market-leading developments like the DRC baseload project—gigantic solar and storage systems delivering firm power in one of the toughest places on Earth. So the story is a mix of quiet distributed adoption and headline-grabbing systems.

You’ve also spoken about recycled materials and end-of-life issues. A lot of Australians are worried about solar waste. You seem more optimistic. Why?

I think the energy transition is inevitable now. We just have a better product than oil and gas. Carbon markets and policies are helpful, but honestly, the horse has left the stable. Renewables are going to take over the world.

That’s great for decarbonisation, and it’s going to be great economically because it’s going to keep getting cheaper to generate and store power. But it’s also going to reduce geopolitical volatility. Europe sent as much money to Russia for gas since the beginning of the Ukraine war as it donated to Ukraine to defend itself. That’s crazy. Renewable energy reduces that kind of dependency.

On renewables recycling, the reason we don’t see huge recycling industries yet is simple: the volume of end-of-life material is still tiny compared to the amount being manufactured.
Last year alone we manufactured one terawatt of solar panels globally. That’s the same as the total amount installed in all history up until last year. So, of course, we’re not recycling much—yet—the first-generation material hasn’t reached end-of-life.

But the physics is clear: more than 95% of the materials in solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are recyclable. As those early waves of technology reach their end-of-life, the recycling industry will scale. It just hasn’t hit yet.

You’ve suggested this will one day reduce mining too.

Yeah—eventually, once enough material is in circulation, we won’t have to mine as much to keep the economy going. We’ll still mine because we’ll still be growing, but a huge amount of material will simply be recycled and reintegrated.

Unlike fossil fuels, you’re not burning something and losing it forever. The lithium remains lithium. The copper remains copper. It’s just material. So the long-term dynamic is pretty exciting.

Let’s talk barriers. What are the main challenges you see—both in Africa and in Australia?

The main barrier used to be cost competitiveness. That’s behind us now. Not everywhere yet, but the direction of travel is clear: we’re going to be cheaper than fossil alternatives everywhere over the next decade.

The next barrier is regulation. Utilities have to accept the new distributed renewable future. Imagine if Telstra in 1990 said, “We’re going to fight mobile phones. We’ll use lobbying to regulate mobile phones out of existence.” You might even win for a few years. But eventually people would say, “Hang on, everyone in America has a mobile phone and it’s clearly better.”

Distributed renewables are like that. They’re inevitable. Economies that adopt them first and focus on integrating them are going to flourish. Utilities that adjust will be major players. Utilities that stick their heads in the sand will get left behind.

We’ve been doing a lot of work in Africa trying to emphasise this to utilities: we’re your friend. We want to help you adjust your business model. But you have to acknowledge the shift caused by these technologies. You can’t ignore it.

Another barrier is investor perception. We’re raising around half a billion dollars of equity now. We’ve raised about $750 million in a mixture of debt and equity to date.

But for whole categories of investors, the reaction is: “Africa? That’s hard. What else you got?” You have to get them past the headline, looking at actual returns and actual risks.

How fast is electrification happening now?

Pretty fast. I think we’re electrifying about 56 million people a year. But population growth is also extremely high. So, the famous “600 million people without electricity” number hasn’t really shifted—not because we’re failing, but because we’re keeping pace rather than overtaking.

But this is what people often miss: exponential change. The amount of storage being installed in Africa this year is more than double last year. Double again next year and the year after, and suddenly it’s huge. It’s like COVID case numbers—five cases, ten cases, twenty cases, eighty cases, and suddenly you’re in trouble. Humans are bad at intuitively understanding exponential curves.

We’re in that exponential moment in the energy system now.

How do you feel doing this work at this moment in history?

Honestly, I feel grateful. I often say to our team that a lot of people go through life without finding the big problem they want to work on. And when you find it, it’s a gift.

And then on top of that, to have the tools to solve that problem in your lifetime? That’s incredible.

With these technologies and these cost curves, we can solve access to electricity, and we can meaningfully address global decarbonisation in the next 20 to 30 years in our careers.

When you have a strong sense of purpose in your job, it makes work fun. So, I’m having a pretty good time. Kenya is a fascinating place. Hopefully one day I’ll find my way back to Australia, but right now it’s a great chapter.