Powering Africa Beyond Solar: Unlocking Biogas, Wind, and Small-Scale Hydro
Tabi T. Tabi's path to clean energy did not follow a conventional route. Growing up between Cameroon and Nigeria, he experienced firsthand the unreliability of power supply that defined daily life for millions of African families — the noise of generators, the rationed hope of NEPA, and the striking contrast between urban and rural access. Those early observations, he explains, planted the questions that would eventually shape his career. After building a telco software company in the United States, Tabi found himself pitching mobile network operators across Africa, only to discover that the fundamental barrier to expanding their infrastructure was not technology — it was electricity. That insight led him to step back from software entirely, return to first principles in physics, and found Granville Energy with a deliberate mandate: solve the infrastructure problem before layering advanced technology on top of it.
The conversation ranges widely across Africa's energy landscape, but a consistent thread runs through it — the dominance of solar in the continent's energy transition narrative has been driven by practical circumstance, not strategic design. Solar won the deployment argument because it was fast, relatively cheap, and easy to finance. Environmental approvals were simpler, costs dropped sharply over the preceding decade, and development finance institutions found it the most bankable option in a risk-sensitive environment. Tabi does not dispute that solar has played a vital role. What he challenges is the assumption that it should remain the centre of the conversation, arguing that the same microgrid architecture that underpins solar mini-grids is entirely transferable to small-scale hydro, biogas, and wind — and that the perceived complexity of these alternatives often reflects unfamiliarity rather than genuine technical difficulty.
Granville's own portfolio illustrates the breadth of this thesis. The company's landmark agreement to develop a 1GW floating solar plant at Nigeria's Kainji Dam — born from earlier work on Guinea's Souapiti hydropower infrastructure — demonstrates the kind of scale Tabi believes is necessary to move Nigeria's energy needle. But even at that scale, he is clear-eyed about the constraints: Nigeria's transmission infrastructure is a critical bottleneck, and generation investment without matching investment in evacuation capacity will not solve the grid's structural fragility.
On financing, Tabi is direct and pointed. Africa's energy transition will not be unlocked by waiting for European development finance institutions to lead. The continent's pension funds, he argues, represent an enormous and largely untapped pool of patient capital that is currently flowing into foreign markets rather than domestic infrastructure. Alongside these, informal savings mechanisms — cooperative societies, stokvels — collectively hold significant capital that structured investment vehicles could begin to mobilise. The problem, he contends, is fundamentally one of trust: if African institutions do not believe in African infrastructure, they cannot expect others to fill that gap.
The interview closes on an institutional note. Tabi's single most important intervention would be a private sector-led Pan-African body with a mandate to harmonise skills recognition, product standards, and financing frameworks across borders — moving, as he puts it, at the pace of markets rather than the pace of politics.
Guest Speakers’ Profiles
Mr Tabi T. Tabi
Tabi is a visionary leader and serial entrepreneur with extensive experience in technology, clean energy and power systems, ICT, engineering and aviation. With a proven track record in founding and leading successful tech businesses like
Tabi Group, Circls and Granville Energy Tabi demonstrates exceptional strategic and entrepreneurial skills with the ability to predict what is next. Dedicated to harnessing Africa's potential, Tabi's forward-thinking mindset drives Granville Energy towards innovation and growth to bring access to affordable clean energy to the masses.
His journey in technology in South Africa started while a college student with his friends, building and selling bespoke computers and software to high-net-worth individuals in Cape Town. He joined eTV/MidiTV in 1998 as an IT consultant to build the IT infrastructure. After Y2K, in 2000, he was headhunted to join the US Tech Consulting company EDS, where he spent two years before relocating to Johannesburg to join a local IT company.
At the end of 2002, he launched his first company in South Africa and has served as a consultant to the government, power utility, large enterprises, telecoms and IT service providers on technology architecture, new venture creation, product development and strategy. As such, it possesses invaluable insights into the challenges and opportunities presented by South Africa's evolving energy landscape. Since then, Tabi has founded and run multiple companies in Africa and the USA. He is currently the CEO of Granville Energy and TABI Group
Key Discussion Points
- Origins and early exposure to energy poverty — growing up across Cameroon and Nigeria, witnessing the instability of NEPA, and the contrast between urban and rural electricity access
- The pivot from tech to energy — how repeated barriers in telco network expansion across Africa revealed electricity as the foundational problem Granville was built to solve
- Why solar dominated the transition conversation — speed of deployment, falling costs, simpler regulatory approval, and DFI bankability preferences drove solar's dominance over other renewables
- The Kainji Dam floating solar project — origins in Guinea's Souapiti hydro work, the partnership with Mainstream Energy Solutions, and its potential to add 1GW to Nigeria's grid
- Nigeria's grid fragility — the grid has collapsed multiple times in 2026; generation investment must be matched by transmission infrastructure, particularly additional North-to-South lines
Produced by The Africa Catalyst Podcast Team within BRAC Studio, the episode was moderated by Chisom Osunwa.
