This is the first time ReVision Energy has done an Annual Report. As a Certified B Corp and 100% Employee-Owned company, we value transparency and are hoping this provides a valuable way of communicating with our stakeholders: our co-owners, customers, and community. This report highlights successes and challenges from 2022, outlines our greatest impact, and details exciting initiatives we are focusing on in 2023 to support our mission and build the equitable, clean energy future we know is possible.
ReVision Energy
2022 ANNUAL REPORT
Executive Summary
A Word from Fortunat Mueller
President & co-founder
2022 Social & Environmental Impact
2022 Impact: By the Numbers
Our mission is to lead our community in solving the environmental problems caused by fossil fuels, and our primary way of achieving this is by installing technologies that reduce carbon emissions at homes and businesses. In 2022, our installed technologies offset 38.7 million pounds of carbon across Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.
B Corp Best for the World
We are proud to have once again been named a Best for the World™ B Corp in 2022 for our sustainable business practices and commitment to our workforce. This means that for the 4th year in a row, we have ranked in the top 5% of 5,000 B Corps worldwide, thanks to initiatives to create a beneficial and balanced work environment for all at ReVision, such as employee-ownership, paid family leave, and flexible scheduling.
2022 Overview
Companywide Highlights
#1 Solar Installer
We improved our ranking in Solar Power World’s Top Solar Contractors List, moving up to the #9 spot nationwide for solar installers, and once again claiming the #1 spot in Maine and New Hampshire.
JEDI & Partnerships
Our Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) employee-owner groups volunteer their time to advance racial justice in our communities, focusing on five pillars: Advocacy, Education & Training, Expanding Solar Access, Retention & Mentorship, and Culture & Talent Development.
We partnered with a variety of local organizations working on these issues, supporting them financially as well as promoting their work. These include: Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire, Gedakina, NAACP Manchester, 350NH, NH Women’s Foundation, Maine Business Immigration Coalition, and American Association of Blacks in Energy.
We started several exciting initiatives in 2022 that we will continue to develop in 2023. Most notable were changes made company-wide and initiatives launched that will set us up for success in the coming years. These include:
2022 Exciting Initiatives
Annual Company Meeting
B Corp Recertification
New Website
Reorganization & Key Personnel
Training & Workforce Development
Marketing
We re-examined our organizational structure, creating an Executive Committee within our “Sequoia” leadership team. The Executive Committee meets regularly with the explicit goal of formally supporting the three business units (Residential, Commercial, Service).
Notable Employee-Owner changes:
Notable Employee-Owner changes:
James Hasselbeck officially transitioned to Chief Operating Officer (COO). After 10 years at ReVision in a variety of Operations roles, we are thrilled to have James formally brought on as COO supporting five different groups: Residential Operations, Commercial Operations, Service, Engineering, and Procurement. This transition was made possible by Sara Bogue taking on the role of VP Residential Operations, John Shanholtz hired as Director of Commercial Construction, and Anna Fincke hired as VP Commercial Operations.
Gwen Baizley is now our Chief Human Resources Officer, and we have plans to hire an HR Director in early 2023. This is a hugely important shift because it will allow Gwen to focus on culture building, training, and making sure ReVision remains a
great place to work.
great place to work.
Bridget Sprague completed her transition to VP of Marketing, which will allow her to fully focus on the marketing team. With continued growth across commercial, residential, and service departments, it’s crucial that our marketing and outreach team be able to serve all three business units under Bridget’s full-time leadership.
We also hired a variety of new leadership positions in 2022, including:
Anna Fincke, VP of Commercial Operations, is one of the most senior positions we’ve ever hired externally. She brings valuable operational experience to us and has been a good counterpart to Dan Weeks in
team leadership.
team leadership.
Nicole Minzy, Director of Finance, brings leadership and experience to the finance team. She has made huge progress in creating accounting tools for our managers that are accessible and efficient.
James Manzer moved into the role of Commercial Sales Director after spearheading the build-out of our Massachusetts branch since 2017.
Reorganization & Key Personnel
Katie Beane-Lewis, JEDI coordinator, started her vitally important role at the end of 2022. Her companywide role will leverage the existing JEDI work done by co-owners and enable everyone at ReVision to be
pillars of JEDI.
pillars of JEDI.
John Shanholz, Director of Commercial Construction, owns construction execution on our largest projects. This is a crucial role; he owns the subcontractor relationship as well as managing our own excellent team of Project Managers
and superintendents.
and superintendents.
Training & Workforce Development
The lack of a robust technical workforce is now the greatest threat to our ability to address the climate crisis in the U.S. While ReVision has been focused on expanding our clean energy workforce since the beginning of our apprenticeship program in 2017, it is now a major policy focus both federally and at the state level. This has enabled us to offer more apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships, and has provided us with more opportunities to reshape how parents, students, and general society think about careers in the trades.
Training & Workforce Development
First Apprenticeship Graduation
We held our first ReVision Energy Electrical Apprenticeship Program (REEAP) graduation at the company meeting in September.
We were awarded over $1 million in grant funding for our workforce development in Maine. These grants include:
Workforce Development Grants
This grant from the Maine Department of Labor, allows us to add three additional apprenticeships (Customer Service, Technical Sales, and Manager Training) to our offerings, and diversify REEAP with the additional electrical needs (service and thermal) that will be necessary to the clean energy future.
With this grant we are also able to widen our apprenticeship by establishing formal collaborations with Pre-Apprenticeship programs offered through Portland Adult Education and LearningWorks Youth Build, helping to structure and solidify pathways for people who have historically been excluded from the economy and the trades.
With this grant we are also able to widen our apprenticeship by establishing formal collaborations with Pre-Apprenticeship programs offered through Portland Adult Education and LearningWorks Youth Build, helping to structure and solidify pathways for people who have historically been excluded from the economy and the trades.
The Maine Apprenticeship Program Grant
The Governor’s Energy Office Clean Energy Partnership Grant
This grant allows us to establish an apprenticeship in solar design and develop resources that standardize solar career progression for Maine workers. This work includes K-12 programming that elevates the stature of clean energy careers, development of a comprehensive RETC pre-apprenticeship to help us build a more robust hiring pipeline, and sharing our efforts with other solar companies across the country to scale the national solar workforce.
The Maine Workforce Development Compact
This grant is managed by the Maine Community College system, and provides direct financial support to offset the costs of training frontline workers. This is an ongoing program.
It’s a huge accomplishment for these 21 graduates to work full-time, commit 150 hours/year of training for 4 years, and attend classes on top of their personal lives. This commitment is integral to the future of our society, so we were thrilled to be able to honor our REEAP graduates in person with the entire company.
Scroll when you see these arrows:
We re-launched in-person PV 101 classes for all our new installers. This quarterly offering focuses on hands-on install lessons, safety training, and cultural onboarding into ReVision and REEAP. Crew leads from all branches help teach these classes, and in 2023 we’re focusing on elevating the role of women in leadership and instructional positions, looking to our partners at Solar Energy International for program models.
Training & Professional Development for Co-Owners
We also launched our “Electricians Will Save the World” Campaign, collaborating with RETC to support workforce development and promote the trades to students and parents. We worked with Redbird Studio to create a call-to-action video, which was shared nationwide and has received over 50,000 views so far.
Marketing
In 2022, we saw record breaking leads, resulting in more referrals, installations, and Solar Champions joining our mission. In total we received 13,799 inquiries from residents, businesses, and organizations curious about solar and other electrification products. That is a 48.5% increase in interest from 2021.
Doubling down on our education focus, we were excited to add a full-time Climate Educator to our team. Stacy Brown will develop shareable intersectional curriculum around climate education and climate justice to empower students and teachers in our region. Using our Tiny Climate Classroom she will partner with workforce development groups, social justice organizations, and schools throughout the year.
Education & Awareness
We worked with fellow B Corp Emzingo to continue our leadership training and incorporate it into our onboarding process. We also launched the Compass program for managers, which serves as a pre-apprenticeship program for our Manager Apprenticeship program (REMAP). This training will better define what it means to be a manager and help support fundamental managerial skills.
We were so excited to finally gather in-person again as a whole company for the first time since 2019, in a fully outdoor meeting at the beautiful Alnoba campus in Kensington, NH. We celebrated our first graduating class of electrical apprentices, launched our Electricians Will Save the World campaign, and connected with co-owners from all parts of New England.
Annual Company Meeting
Our B Corp certification requires us to recertify every three years. This B Impact Assessment consists of several hundred questions related to how we serve our diverse stakeholders and put into practice our commitment to using Business as a Force for Good. The questions are broken into five categories: Workers, Community, Environment, Governance, and Customers.
B Corp Recertification
The Assessment is scored out of 200 total available points, with a mean score for an ‘ordinary’ company of 50.9 and a minimum score for certification of 80. When ReVision first certified in 2015, we scored 94.4 and when we last recertified in 2019, we received a score of 125.9. Consistent with our commitment to continuous improvement, we’ve set a goal for ourselves of achieving a score of 135 in the current cycle. In 2022, a group of co-owners from a variety of roles across the company worked to complete the B Impact Assessment. Our Assessment is now in ‘verification’ with B Labs and we expect to be recertified in the first half of 2023.
New Website
In 2022 we finalized an 18-month project to build a new website for ReVision Energy, with the goal of creating an improved, modernized platform that matched our evolving brand and served our rapidly growing company and community. We designed, built, and launched a new website that offers a better user experience while maintaining the high-quality, educational content we’ve built up over the years. After co-owner interviews and competitor analysis, we worked with a team of developers to custom build a website that is easier to manage, integrate with other platforms, and serve all our growing departments.
We also redesigned the architecture to give more space to areas like workforce development and recruitment. Lastly, we improved key features of our website, like our solar calculator, and optimized it for mobile and SEO.
2022 Overview
Residential Highlights
Summary
We had our best year ever for residential sales. The creativity and resilience of our experienced residential design team helped us push through many industry-wide challenges, including inflation, interest rate hikes, and utility issues. We also established our teams of Customer Experience Managers to better support our Solar Champions throughout their solar journey.
Although delays on the utilities’ end cause frequent customer irritation, we were able to complete the most ground mount solar projects in one year; our Montville and NH branches installed over 55 each! Demand for renewable energy in all our markets has continued to grow, creating longer than ideal waits for our customers in both Site Visits and Installations; we are continuing to increase our hiring efforts to meet this demand.
Although delays on the utilities’ end cause frequent customer irritation, we were able to complete the most ground mount solar projects in one year; our Montville and NH branches installed over 55 each! Demand for renewable energy in all our markets has continued to grow, creating longer than ideal waits for our customers in both Site Visits and Installations; we are continuing to increase our hiring efforts to meet this demand.
Residential Impact
2046
PROJECTS
2022 Overview
Commercial Highlights
Summary
The Commercial Sales and Finance teams had a strong year and reached our goal of new onsite and offsite solar contracts totaling 44 MW – enough to offset over 50 million pounds of carbon annually, equivalent to around 7,500 homes. In 2022 we completed our largest projects to-date in each of our markets, including a 7.1 MW solar farm in Skowhegan, ME and the largest onsite rooftop and municipal projects ever built in New Hampshire at 1.3 MW each. We also installed our two largest carports to-date: one for Oyster River Middle School in NH, and one for the Portland VA Clinic.
Utility interconnection delays out of our control continue to be our biggest challenge, but we worked with other solar companies to plan a strong strategic response to address these unrealistic delays and costs. 2022 was also very challenging from the supply chain perspective. The ongoing pandemic, historic inflation levels, and Russia’s war on Ukraine seriously impacted the cost and timeframe of all major materials. Thanks to our involvement with Amicus Solar Co-Op and advance planning by our procurement team, we were able to insulate ReVision from some of these costs. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is huge for climate action. In 2022 we focused on communicating the new incentives to customers and developed plans to bring community solar to low-income and environmental justice communities with the help of IRA. We’re looking forward to energizing two more Community Solar Farms in Maine in 2023, and there is strong demand from commercial clients and mission-aligned investors for partnering with ReVision in 2023 and beyond.
Utility interconnection delays out of our control continue to be our biggest challenge, but we worked with other solar companies to plan a strong strategic response to address these unrealistic delays and costs. 2022 was also very challenging from the supply chain perspective. The ongoing pandemic, historic inflation levels, and Russia’s war on Ukraine seriously impacted the cost and timeframe of all major materials. Thanks to our involvement with Amicus Solar Co-Op and advance planning by our procurement team, we were able to insulate ReVision from some of these costs. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is huge for climate action. In 2022 we focused on communicating the new incentives to customers and developed plans to bring community solar to low-income and environmental justice communities with the help of IRA. We’re looking forward to energizing two more Community Solar Farms in Maine in 2023, and there is strong demand from commercial clients and mission-aligned investors for partnering with ReVision in 2023 and beyond.
Commercial Impact
120
PROJECTS
2022 Overview
Service Highlights
Summary
Our service team, which services and maintains every piece of technology we’ve installed in the past 20 years, has some of the most challenging work in the company, while also having a huge impact on our community of Solar Champions. In 2022 we accelerated the build-out of the Service team, decreased customer wait times, and established strong systems to handle the service requests from the 15,000+ systems we’ve installed since 2003. As an experienced local company, ReVision is well positioned to be a leader in the O&M market, offering our service to larger national companies taking advantage of Maine’s solar policies; this will provide our company with predictable, recurring revenue, while helping our states meet climate goals.
Residential Impact
The service department achieved success by continuing to uphold ReVision Energy’s impeccable customer service. We have included two memorable quotes from happy customers:
“Had a service call from Jonathan to replace a defective inverter. Jonathan took a great deal of time to install it properly, check its operation, and he helped me install apps on my phone to monitor it remotely. He was very pleasant and professional, right to the end of an unexpectedly long visit. Best service anyone could ask for!” (Bold C.)
“The service was excellent; Dan Leonard and his team were very thorough during the process. I’ve had a few questions about the tank since it was installed and Dan has been immediately responsive and helpful. Their genuine and hopeful attitudes toward the greater impact of solar energy shows in their work and service.” (Anna D.)
NEW INQUIRIES
FIELDED
FIELDED
5,113
34
EMPLOYEE-OWNERS
IN SERVICE
3,535
WORK ORDERS
COMPLETED
10
NEW HIRES
65.2
MEGAWATTS UNDER
MANAGEMENT
2023 Initiatives
CompanyWide
Training & Workforce Development
Thanks in part to the grants received from the Maine Department of Labor and the Governor’s Energy Office, we are preparing to launch four new apprenticeships in 2023: Customer Service, Manager, Technical Sales, and Solar Design. We are also working closely with the Portland Adult Education pre-apprenticeship program. These apprenticeships will create a years-long line of support for all our team members who support our customers, from first contact to installation.
Vaughan Woodruff, Director of RETC, shares more in the video below:
Vaughan Woodruff, Director of RETC, shares more in the video below:
ReVision Energy Training Center (RETC)
Our commitment to the JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion) initiatives is now fully powered with a dedicated JEDI Coordinator. Katie Beane-Lewis is spending the first half of the year getting to know us all, helping us with our messaging and language, and fully defining and giving structure to our existing JEDI pillars. Katie will have input on the 5 apprenticeship programs, and will facilitate specific JEDI focused trainings like we’ve done in the past.
Justice, Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion (JEDI)
Our goal is to have a net zero operation by 2030, and that includes our facilities planning. We’ll be performing a multi-year facilities study, with the help of our Zero Waste Specialist Joel Alder, to see how we can incorporate more transportation electrification, rooftop solar, and off-site solar to supplement our energy needs.
Continued Facilities Upgrades
2023 Initiatives
Residential
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has provided momentum for both solar and electrification efforts more broadly. In 2023 we will focus on continued hiring for our teams, again concentrating on electrician advancement and recruitment. We are also planning to grow our Massachusetts team and expand our reach in that market.
2023 Initiatives
Commercial
An increased awareness of the value of solar combined with rising energy costs means that there is a lot of customer interest in solar technologies. The federal tax credit returning to 30% is very beneficial for commercial customers, and there are also exciting new provisions and incentives around low-income projects, brownfield projects, and American-made components. These incentives will help drive new business in 2023 and beyond. Our EV team will continue to grow in 2023, focusing on a mix of DC Fast Charging, large Level 2 clusters for fleet charging, and bus charging.
2023 Initiatives
Service
In 2023 we are splitting our Service team into two divisions: Residential and Commercial Operations & Maintenance. Our Residential team will service and maintain all the residential technology we install today, as well as the technology we installed back in 2003 (including solar hot water). Our O&M team will provide routine maintenance and upkeep to large-scale commercial projects. We now have a core group of senior technicians established, so in 2023 we have a real opportunity to hire and train technicians who are newer to the industry. We plan on pairing mentors and mentees to increase on-the-job training, which will in turn expand our hiring capacity.
Phoebe Hunt, Vice President of Service, shares more in the video below:
Phoebe Hunt, Vice President of Service, shares more in the video below:
Looking beyond 2023, Phil Coupe paints a picture of a hopeful, hard earned future built on beneficial electrification. With the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022, there is now a wide-scale focus on energy and climate that is not strictly environmentally driven, but inclusive of energy security and economic imperative. We’ve been talking about electrification for years and the world is finally preparing for it on a large scale.
The idea of “electrifying everything” is no longer a maybe; it’s only a question of pace, execution and equity. As an industry and company, we are not where we need to be on issues of social and climate justice. The IRA contains the most explicit commitment to an equitable energy transition by order of magnitude, but we need to act on that. Everything we do needs to be informed by equity. As humans of this earth and as co-owners of this company we’re excited to be at the forefront of these efforts and continue to lead our communities and industry towards a more equitable, accessible, electrified future.
The idea of “electrifying everything” is no longer a maybe; it’s only a question of pace, execution and equity. As an industry and company, we are not where we need to be on issues of social and climate justice. The IRA contains the most explicit commitment to an equitable energy transition by order of magnitude, but we need to act on that. Everything we do needs to be informed by equity. As humans of this earth and as co-owners of this company we’re excited to be at the forefront of these efforts and continue to lead our communities and industry towards a more equitable, accessible, electrified future.
Beyond 2023
Closing remarks from Phil Coupe
Visionary & Co-founder
We will be a completely net zero operation by 2030.
ReVision Energy has three long-term goals to achieve by 2030, which we’re calling our Sun Shots (a play on “moon shot”):
We will have built clean energy projects equivalent to eliminating fossil fuels from 1,000,000 New England homes.
We will be the most respected employee-owned company in the U.S.
Thank you for being a part of
our year and mission.
our year and mission.
29 Million
POUNDS OF CARBON OFFSET
30,021
BARRELS OF OIL DISPLACED
23.98
MEGAWATTS
63,445
SOLAR PANELS
87
SOLAR PROJECTS
30
EV CHARGING
PROJECTS
10,000
KILOWATTS
26,500
SOLAR
PANELS
1069
SOLAR
PROJECTS
583
HEAT PUMP
PROJECTS
135
HEAT PUMP
WATER HEATER
PROJECTS
198
BATTERY
PROJECTS
61
EV CHARGING
PROJECTS
11. 4 Million
POUNDS OF CARBON OFFSET
12,519
BARRELS OF OIL DISPLACED
