Green Lightning Energy’s Path to B Corp Certification

Written by Jason Plant, Co-Founder of Green Lightning Energy

Sometimes, the best business ideas come from solving the problems right in front of you. For us, it was watching our moms get quoted sky-high prices for solar panel installation. They believed in the benefits of clean energy, but the cost was a serious barrier. So, my friend Kadin Burns and I put our heads together and built a solution that saved them tens of thousands and sparked the beginning of Green Lightning Energy, a company born from the drive to make solar simple and accessible.

Our first media spotlight came from Clean Energy NH’s Young Professionals in Energy (YPIE) program, which gave us a platform early on to connect with other clean energy advocates and members of the clean energy community. Since then, we have expanded our business throughout New Hampshire, hired our first employee (shoutout to Miles Drum, our amazing Director of Sales!), expanded to commercial projects, and most recently, we have become a Certified B Corporation!

Certified B Corporations are leaders of a global movement of people using business as a force for good. By reaching the goals of the certification, these organizations have reached the highest standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability by implementing key sustainability initiatives that combat greenwashing. Becoming B Corp Certified offers a stamp of approval from a reliable and trustworthy third-party source. Perhaps most importantly, the certification also serves to catalyze the larger movement for the business community to shift its primary objective from maximizing shareholder value to providing value for all stakeholders affected by business: workers, customers, suppliers, local communities, and the planet.

Despite having taken a handful of companies through the certification process as a student consultant in the University of New Hampshire’s B Impact Clinic, it was a completely different challenge to navigate the certification for our own company. We had to come to terms with an obstacle I had seen many clients face before: we got very few points for each positive answer on the assessment. By design, this forced us to take a hard look at our entire business and find incremental ways to improve our impact in every functional area and for every stakeholder we touch. Luckily, we found that in many cases, instead of trading profitability for purpose, we were able to find win-win solutions that helped us grow the business and helped us scale our impact. 

My favorite example is our Solar Horizons Program, which gives a significant discount to Low Socioeconomic Status (SES) Individuals (as defined by making lower than a living wage according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator) and US Veterans. It solved a key problem for our business in that we often met with customers who, despite our affordable pricing model, still could not afford solar. This kind of initiative is especially timely as New Hampshire explores new approaches to broaden access to clean energy - like community power programs, ratepayer-funded incentives through NHSaves, and ongoing legislative discussions about solar access for low-income households. Programs like Solar Horizons help ensure that the benefits of solar aren’t just for the well-off - they’re for everyone.

The Solar Horizons Program gave us a mechanism to support the customers who needed it the most, and justify why we gave them much lower pricing than we would normally allow. In addition to solving this problem in our business, the program also granted us several points on the B Impact Assessment in the Community section. This is just one of the many, many examples of how the B Corp Certification helped us brainstorm ways that we could improve our impact and our underlying business at the same time!

What’s Next?

Our company became certified just before B Lab - the independent nonprofit that created and administers the B Corp Certification - released an entirely new framework. While we expect this framework to challenge us even more than their original assessment did as we prepare to recertify, we now know from experience that it will only inspire deeper, more innovative ideas for how to improve the outcomes our business creates for our stakeholders. 

We are lucky to have amassed a small but mighty community around our venture that we know we can count on for valuable feedback and ideas on how we can improve. Chief among them are our moms, who have supported us not just since the beginning of our company, but the beginning of our lives! They continue to actively support our business and give us some of our best ideas. It is thanks to our mothers, and their belief in us from the very beginning, that we continue to make solar more affordable and pursue our dreams of being successful entrepreneurs.

About the Author:

Jason Plant is a serial social entrepreneur with ventures spanning from clean water to clean energy to semiconductor. His B Corp Certified solar installation company, Green Lightning Energy, has made high quality solar installations affordable for customers all across New England. He proudly serves his community as a nonprofit Board Member for the NH Toy Library and Ideas by Youth.