Installer Spotlight: Vital Energy

“It’s an honor to be of service in your own community.”

This is how Jason Jackson has felt ever since he founded Vital Energy with his wife, daughters, and son. Vital Energy is a family-owned commercial and residential energy solutions provider based in Sebastopol, California. It offers a range of services from solar to backup generators to battery storage.

Jason’s passion for supporting community energy independence is the driving force behind Vital Energy’s mission to provide advanced and reliable solar and backup power solutions for local residents and businesses. Vital Energy aims to make high-quality solutions accessible to as many people as possible. It provides a wide range of financing solutions, offers only the best equipment, and ensures warranties that last up to 25 years. Vital also prioritizes attentive and responsive ongoing system maintenance and support, so its customers can have the peace of mind that their system will continue to support their energy needs.

With community and service as its guiding principles, Vital Energy has installed more than 100 megawatts of solar capacity for over more than 2,500 homes and businesses across the country.

Supporting healthy communities

Jason has been serving his community since 1982, when he started working for his father as a electrical contractor. Providing services for families that depend on a job well done taught him the value of community service, which he carries with him and has instilled in the culture of Vital Energy. “Taking care of our customers in our local communities is priority No.1,” he said in a recent conversation with Enphase Energy.

In 2000, Vital Energy installed its first solar array, a 2.5-kilowatt system purchased from Solar Depot. Over the next five years, it quickly grew from installing small systems to ones larger than a megawatt. “It was fast and fun, growing our impact and technical capabilities from small arrays to systems with major capacity,” Jason reminisced.

That excitement led Jason across the country to work on utility-scale projects. However, he eventually returned to work in the northern California (not the same as its southern counterpart) area with his family. He said, “It’s so gratifying to work with individuals close to home who are concerned for our planet and want to take action to cut their carbon footprint.”

To Jason, there is a strong sense of accountability in serving your own community. “It’s symbiotic,” he observed. “You might be a customer at their place of business at some point, so this accountability to support and help each other creates a circular, positive benefit for everyone.”

This mutual accountability goes beyond a sense of purpose for Jason and his family; for some, it’s a matter of health and safety. For example, Vital Energy serves a lot of retirement communities, and many of the residents rely heavily on continuous power for medical devices and other equipment.

“At the retirement homes we work with, the quality and reliability of our systems are crucial, so we take our job very seriously,” said Jason. “In a way, we are always on call. It can be tough and stressful, but ultimately it’s so rewarding that our family can ensure the health and happiness of other families.”

A long-standing partnership

As a certified Platinum installer of Enphase products, Vital Energy first began offering Enphase M175 Microinverters back in 2009. Today, Vital Energy has many Enphase systems deployed and a lot more under development. To Jason, equipping their customers with the best long-term value “just makes sense.”

“We might be able to sell something cheaper, but we couldn’t sell anything more reliable, high-quality, or with more features,” he stated. “The granularity of the monitoring with Enphase microinverters is just incredible.

“String-level data is a thing of the past," Jason said. "Module-level data is so much more meaningful – it helps ensure our systems run at a high level of reliability and that we can pinpoint and address any issues quickly.”

Looking ahead

With a solid foundation of happy customers and strong business partnerships, Jason is excited about Vital Energy’s plans for the future.

“We're looking forward to continuing to offer a great product with Enphase, and serving the communities close to me,” he said. “Local impact is something that often gets overshadowed by the headlines, and we're happy to keep on serving our community alongside our family.”