Q&A with Green Lightning Energy’s Jason Plant & Miles Drum

Nearly two years ago, Jason Plant and Kadin Burns founded Green Lightning Energy in Sanbornton with the goal to make clean energy affordable for everyday homeowners.

They started with their moms, saving them tens of thousands of dollars on their solar installations.

The company recently became a Certified B Corporation, a designation that says the company meets high standards of verified social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency.

Plant, the company’s CEO, and Miles Drum, director of sales, recently appeared as guests on NH Business Review’s “Down to Business Podcast.” This story was adapted from their interview and was edited for space and clarity.

Jason, how did you take this idea of helping your mom save money on her solar energy and using it to build your company?

My co-founder, Kadin Burns, was getting involved with some home improvement projects that involve solar, and I was looking for a business to start. Coincidentally, both of our moms were looking for solar and received very high quotations, particularly from big corporate brands.

Kadin and I had both had some tangential exposure to the solar industry prior. When we looked at these quotes, we kind of thought, well, this doesn’t really make too much sense. It shouldn’t cost that much.’

Because self-installations are legal in New Hampshire, we could actually go on the roof and build it ourselves. We decided to do that for both of our moms and just see how much it ended up costing us. We found that we were able to provide solar to our parents for much lower prices than was predominantly found in the market at the time.

Once we had finished our parents’ solar arrays, and they were performing the way that we expected them to, we decided to start a business around this and pass on that value to homeowners across New Hampshire. We’re starting to penetrate into Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts as well. Now we have the new B Corp certification, so things have been going well. We’re super grateful for both our moms.

Tell us about how you saved your mom $30,000 and Kadin’s mom $20,000. Where are the cost savings coming from?

Just to be super clear, those savings of $30,000 for my mom and $20,000 for Kadin’s are just purely off of the price. The actual savings they get from getting solar are pretty comparable to what you would get from competitors. We’re just simply making the price lower.

How do we do that? There are really two main things, although there are a lot of little things we do in the background to try and optimize.

We do not invest in our own warehouses and transportation and distribution infrastructure. A lot of solar companies, particularly large ones, have an enormous amount of overhead behind their business. Not only does that follow through to the consumer by giving them much higher prices, but it also makes them vulnerable in economic downturns, because they’re running much more of a fixed-cost business than a variable-cost business.

From the very beginning we tried to run on a variable-cost model, because we know that the solar industry can be volatile and because it allows us to provide better prices. We have suppliers that are capable of delivering within 24 hours of notice to our customers directly, even small volume deliveries — just enough to do a single residential job. That prevents us from having to build our own warehouses and buy our own trucks and hire a bunch of folks to do that.

The other way is we work with electricians that have been doing solar installations for decades. We contract with electrician firms that specialize in solar and have been doing it for decades and have great workmanship warranties but who we don’t have to have on payroll when there aren’t any jobs available for them.

When you first started this company there was a lot of regulatory requirements that you had to take into account. Is there a lot of red tape that you have to cut to become a solar company?

The biggest challenges for us immediately was gaining access to electricians because you can’t do a solar installation unless it’s in the house that you live, which is what we did for our parents. You can’t do a solar installation unless you’re a licensed electrician. We had to do a lot of experimenting to figure out the best model for gaining access to electricians. The other regulations that we deal with are primarily the permitting processes, which are specific to each town.

Miles, how did you get connected with these guys?

We met during college. We hadn’t worked together in too much of a capacity previously, but he had seen some of the work I had done in college running an exterior painting business that was pretty successful, and I managed to do extremely well in the sales and marketing part of the business.