My parent’s house in the Indian city of Vadodara is in a quiet middle-class neighborhood. When we moved to the area almost 35 years ago, fields surrounded our house. Today, it is a bit of a concrete jungle.
In the last three years, the view of the roof has changed. It is not a particularly aesthetically pleasing change, but it is interesting.\
Looking North - the pink boxes are all solar panels oriented South-North.
In the last three years, rooftop solar panels have increased in our neighborhood and many others in the city. Here is an aerial view.
Each roof with a solar panel generates between 3 - 8kW of electricity, which goes back into the electric grid via an inverter.
The city of Vadodara lies just south of the Tropic of Cancer and gets more than 300 sunny days a year. In practice, an 8 kW installation would cover about a significant amount of the electricity consumption of an average Indian household.
At COP26, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid out an extremely ambitious goal to make India reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2070. India also plans to make 65% of all new vehicles sold to be electric by 2030. Given the size of the country and the current state of EV charging infrastructure, this is not going to be easy.
The solar panels in my neighborhood offer an example of bottom-up change. Central and State governments provide subsidies to households looking to install solar roof panels. Late last year, the government made it even easier by allowing families to choose the type of solar panel installed and who could install it, as long as it was somewhat reasonable.
Both State and Central governments have also rolled out attractive subsidies for electric scooters and rickshaws. Since most new vehicles sold in India are of the two and three-wheeled variety, a combination of a small rooftop solar installation and a cheap electric scooter appears to be a tempting proposition.
They have also removed the subsidies on petrol (gasoline) and diesel, making a gallon of gas almost twice as expensive as I can get at my local gas station in Virginia.
I imagined grand, centralized plans when I first heard about India’s COP26 targets. But the reality seems to be somewhat different. By de-regulating, simplifying, and encouraging the creation of a distributed electric grid, India appears to be well on the way to meeting its very ambitious targets.
Instead of a grand Moonshot, they seem to be moving towards their targets through a series of small, targeted, incremental changes.
Looking out over my parent’s neighborhood, reminded of the Roofshot Manifesto from Google’s Luiz Andre Barrosa. He says:
But there has been a growing perception that moonshots are the primary model for radical innovation at Google, and chiefly responsible for our greatest product and technical achievements. What I have seen during my 15 years at Google does not match that perception. I contend that the bulk of our successes have been the result of the methodical, relentless, and persistent pursuit of 1.3-2X opportunities -- what I have come to call "roofshots."
Significant changes come through the “methodical, relentless, and persistent pursuit of 1.3 - 2X opportunities”. The idea is that small changes in the right direction can compound to make significant changes over a while.
India’s ambitious goals around electrification and the reduction of carbon emissions may look like a Moonshot, but India will most likely achieve it through a sequence of Roofshots.
This model could also effectively drive organizational change and navigate tricky, technology-led disruption.