Who will be the Saudi Arabia of renewables? It’s not who you think, says CrossBoundary Co-founder Matt Tilleard

Nairobi, 2 October 2025 — In a TED talk released today, Co-founder and Managing Partner of CrossBoundary Group Matt Tilleard presents an alternative to outdated scarcity-based narratives and reframes the energy transition as one of innovation and abundance. His assertion – the energy transition is fundamentally different than previous shifts because it is driven by technology, rather than fuel.

Drawing on CrossBoundary Energy’s work across Africa, Tilleard illustrates how technology-based systems resist geopolitical choke points. In Tolagnaro, Madagascar, a remote town situated near a large mineral mine – once dependent on Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) – now runs on solar, batteries, and wind. Even if global supply chains for lithium or copper were disrupted tomorrow, the lights would stay on — because once built, technology endures.

This distinction between fuels that disappear when consumed and technologies that persist once built has profound implications for geopolitics. Oil and gas revenues have sustained conflicts and shielded regimes from sanctions. By contrast, new distributed energy systems diffuse power. They shift the balance away from chokepoints and toward innovation and deployment.

For Africa and other underserved markets, the shift is especially significant. Rather than being reduced to suppliers of raw inputs, they are proving they can build affordable, reliable, and scalable energy systems that both fuel growth and demonstrate resilience to global shocks.

“The great nations of tomorrow will be those that identify their comparative advantages and invent, improve and build the technology we need. The future of energy is not controlled — it’s shared. It is not extracted — it’s built. And it belongs to all of us,” Tilleard concludes.

Watch the full TED Talk