From Fire to Electricity: Dhanur Grandhi’s Impact on Green Tech Adoption

The Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise celebrates 20 for 20 honoree Dhanur Grandhi, MBA ’12, cofounder and CEO of WattBot.

The career path of Dhanur Grandhi, MBA ’12 has been anything but conventional with his green tech journey beginning in China, where he sold freight to solar panel manufacturers. His dedication to consumer adoption of sustainable technologies has helped over 250,000 U.S. homes solarize or electrify. A graduate of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Grandhi is one of the 20 for 20 Notable Alumni honored this year in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise (CSGE) at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.

After completing his MBA at Cornell, Grandhi cofounded and later sold Sunible, a software company that streamlined the solar-buying process for consumers. He went on to lead efforts at Sunrun, Mosaic, and SPAN to deploy residential solar systems, backup batteries, heat pumps, smart electrical  panels, and EV chargers. Now, as the cofounder and CEO of WattBot, he is focused on increasing the adoption rate of residential solar. His career has been defined by a relentless drive to make sustainable technologies accessible and appealing to everyday consumers.

Influential to Grandhi’s decision to pursue his studies at the SC Johnson College was the opportunity to participate in the Sustainable Global Enterprise (SGE) Immersion program. Reflecting on his nomination, Grandhi says, “SGE set off a chain of events that enabled me to pursue my passion, build a career, and deliver the impact that resulted in this recognition. I’ve realized over time that there’s truly no substitute for the SGE experience. You do SGE to become smarter about the multidisciplinary sustainability problem.”

Learn more about Grandhi in this Q&A.

Navigating the challenges of adopting sustainable technologies

Q. What impact do you want to have in the world?

Grandhi: I want to help “consumerize” electrification. To me, that means motivating everyday people to upgrade their lives from fire-based machines (like combustion vehicles, furnaces, boilers, and stoves) to ones that use electricity. These upgrades can make life meaningfully better, but there’s a lot for consumers to untangle. This might be the hardest consumer behavior problem of our time because, as journalist BF Nagy eloquently puts it in the book Proven Climate Solutions: Leading Voices on How to Accelerate Change, “We’ve become conditioned to cope by regularly wiping out our memory banks. We seem to be living in the movie Don’t Look Up. We spend about three seconds assessing each of the thousands of ideas fighting for our attention every day, as if we’re strolling through the central marketplace, with merchants offering a taste of the weekly cheese special or showing off a great new gadget.”

Since over 50 percent of U.S. emissions are influenced by one-time decisions consumers make around their transport, housing, and energy use, encouraging more and more people to transition from combustion to electricity becomes transformative.

Q. What is the biggest challenge you have encountered as you built your career in sustainability and how did you overcome it?

Grandhi: I have been focused on the consumer adoption side of things. One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced is communicating the complex benefits of sustainable technologies like solar panels, home batteries, and heat pumps to consumers. These benefits, both financial and nonfinancial, are not immediately apparent and are impacted by a multitude of factors like occupant behavior, energy prices, local climate, and property characteristics. The complexity is compounded by the abstract nature of energy, an esoteric and invisible commodity!

While we haven’t completely overcome this challenge, significant progress has been made through innovative applications of software, design, and data to streamline user experiences and simplify decision-making processes. Software-based tools like usage simulators, bill trackers, insight engines, pricing calculators, and financing plans have all played a crucial role. Because a lot of these solutions are unprecedented, a key to our success has been having strong opinions on what products should exist and how they should work.

Q. Envision the future of sustainability in your industry. What trend excites you and gives you hope for the future?

Fire is civilization’s greatest discovery but now poses a significant threat to our existence. We have an amazing opportunity to upgrade from fire to electricity. Accelerating this inevitable transition is what excites me the most. I envision a world that is (almost!) fully electric. I’m excited because electric machines can be cheaper, cleaner, comfier, quieter, safer, smaller, and smarter than gas and gasoline burners. It presents so many pathways to creating markets and benefiting humanity.

Career advice

Q. Can you share any insights or lessons learned from your experiences that may inspire current students who want to be sustainability leaders? What advice would you give them?

Grandhi: My first insight is that sustainability should be viewed not as a crisis but an opportunity. This arguably controversial perspective may be driven by my inherently optimistic nature, but I have always believed that sustainable technologies are not just necessary; they are superior. By definition, sustainable technologies outperform incumbent technologies in almost every aspect except cost. This leads to my second insight: Innovation alone is not enough. We must implement solutions at scale because that’s the only way to bring costs down. As Jigar Shah, director of the Loan Programs Office at the U.S. Department of Energy, puts it: “Deploy, Deploy, Deploy.”

Both these insights require approaching sustainability with an entrepreneurial spirit. It’s exciting to see this happening here in Silicon Valley with the great migration of talent from traditional to climate tech. It feels like the early days of the tech boom.

Q. What does it mean to you to be selected for the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise 20 for 20 Notable Alumni list?

Grandhi: This recognition is profoundly meaningful to me. I decided to study at Cornell because of the SGE immersion. It set off a chain of events that enabled me to pursue my passion, build a career and deliver the impact that resulted in this recognition. After graduating, I remember asking myself if I should have done a traditional major instead. But looking back, I realize that being a part of the SGE program has been transformational. There’s truly no substitute for the SGE experience. You can’t solve the sustainability problem without a full grasp of its contours and tentacles, and being in SGE allowed me to work on some of the most challenging problems from a multidisciplinary perspective.

You also choose SGE for the community—to hang out with other weirdos who find sustainability intellectually interesting. The capitalists who, like me, think this is a way cooler approach to personal success and impact. And you choose SGE to meet people like faculty director Mark Milstein, who is gifted with the intellect as well as the gift of gab to engage, debate and provoke us knuckleheads.

Q. What is your favorite sustainability quote or book?

Grandhi: Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future by Saul Griffith.

Learn more about 20 for 20 nominations.