Solar panels are wonderfully indiscreet. They sit on a roof, flash in the noon sun, and announce that something has changed. The harder work tends to hide below: a lender's consent, an aging electrical service, a stack of utility bills, a tax rule, a board vote, a roof caught awkwardly between too old for panels and too young to replace. Isaac Baker has spent a decade in that invisible layer.
As co-founder and co-CEO of Boston's Resonant Energy, Baker develops solar for organizations that conventional providers have often found cumbersome: affordable-housing owners, nonprofits, schools, houses of worship and community institutions. These customers have roofs and electricity bills. What they may lack is spare capital, a facilities department with weeks to chase documents, or a balance sheet shaped to please a standard solar financier.
Baker's business is built on a quietly provocative premise. A difficult customer is sometimes just a customer being asked to carry too much of the process. Remove the weight - analyze the portfolio, model the savings, coordinate the bids, assemble the financing, manage approvals - and a neglected market begins to look like a very real one.
The first technology was the wrong one
The origin story begins in Vermont, but not with a solar panel. Baker met Ben Underwood in late 2014, after each had finished an undergraduate degree there. Baker had studied Environmental Studies and English at Middlebury College, a pairing that feels almost too apt for his later career: one discipline studies the system; the other worries over how people make meaning from it.
The two recent graduates wanted to work where climate change met social change. Their first notion was biogas - turning food and animal waste into energy, an alluring proposition in farm country. Within roughly six months, they decided it was early for the kind of venture they hoped to create. They abandoned the mechanism but kept the mission.
At Co-op Power, a consumer-owned clean-energy cooperative, they worked on shared solar intended to reach people regardless of income or credit score. Baker later described that period as their incubation. It taught them that access is not a warm feeling applied after a project is designed. Access is the project design: who can qualify, who carries the risk, where the savings go, and whose patience is required.
Resonant Energy launched in August 2016. One of its early tests was the Second Church in Dorchester. The church had wanted solar for five years. The sunlight was cooperative; the financial market was not. Working with partners including Sunwealth, Co-op Power and Massachusetts Interfaith Power & Light, Resonant helped turn the stalled roof into an operating project.
There is an entire founder's education inside that church. The obvious product was an array. The actual product was a route through the obstacles that had kept a willing customer waiting half a decade.
The product is the path
Affordable housing makes the hidden work especially visible. A portfolio may contain townhouses, large apartment buildings, roofs of several ages, multiple meters and lenders whose approval is contractually required. Even collecting the basic data for a feasibility study can consume staff time a mission-driven housing organization does not have.
Resonant's answer is to treat coordination as a core service. Its teams review electricity use, draw preliminary layouts, compare ownership and financing options, flag roof or electrical barriers, run competitive bids and guide construction. A client can see which buildings work, which need attention and where savings can travel - to a common meter, another property, tenants or a partner organization.
The invisible solar array
The details sound administrative because they are. Administration is where worthy infrastructure often goes to wait. In a Massachusetts affordable-housing program covered in 2021, Baker explained that the company gathered building data and created custom designs for every property. Roof age could still derail a project. So could the need to secure consent from every investor or lender. Resonant built tracking systems and assigned people to pursue those permissions.
At Madison Park Development Corporation in Roxbury, that process became a 17-rooftop portfolio totaling 580 kilowatts. Resonant says the systems serve buildings housing 430 households and are expected to generate nearly $1 million in utility savings over 25 years. At South Boston Neighborhood Development Corporation, the work included connecting the organization with a roofer and coordinating eight roof replacements across a 13-building solar portfolio. The panel is the photogenic part. The roof warranty has better plot control.
A climate company with an ownership question
Baker's argument about access also points inward. Resonant became a Certified B Corporation in February 2020. It is employee-owned, and its current team page lists Baker as both co-CEO and employee owner. Employees become eligible for ownership after their third anniversary, with decision-making rights and participation in profits.
Years until eligibility.
Resonant says employees can become owners after their third work anniversary, connecting tenure to governance and company value.
That structure creates a pleasing symmetry. Resonant asks who benefits when energy infrastructure lands in a neighborhood. Its cap table asks a related question: who benefits when the developer itself creates value? Neither affordable solar nor employee ownership is automatic. Both require rules, documents and a willingness to distribute advantages that firms normally concentrate.
The company has had to grow while keeping that design intact. Resonant's 2024 impact report called it the largest installation year in company history at the time and recorded 12 new full-time hires. The following year broke the record again. By the end of 2025, the company reported nearly 15 megawatts installed, more than 370 projects and $50 million in total solar investment. Its installed systems, the report estimated, could save clients as much as $75 million over their operating lives.
Policy becomes a building material
Baker's later education made explicit what the early projects had already demonstrated. In 2020 and 2021, he completed Yale's certificate in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy. The verbs matter. Clean technology does not create public benefit while sitting in a catalog. It must be financed, permitted, interconnected and deployed.
That makes policy a daily operating input. Federal tax credits can rescue a nonprofit's economics; a state definition can determine whether a shelter counts as a low-income property; a city emissions ordinance can turn rooftop solar into one piece of a compliance plan. Resonant has advocated around Massachusetts' SMART incentives, including broader eligibility for several kinds of limited-resource housing under SMART 3.
Policy can also arrive as a clock. After federal legislation in 2025 accelerated the phaseout schedule for solar credits, developers raced to preserve eligibility through safe-harbor rules. In July 2026, Baker wrote that Resonant had signed 282 projects representing more than $80 million in new solar investment since the phaseout announcement, with more than $30 million in federal tax support secured for planned projects. The figures were company-reported, but the frantic operating reality was plain: a deadline in Washington had filled a Boston office with contracts.
A month later, Baker published guidance on Boston's Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance, or BERDO. For large-building owners, the clean-energy transition now comes with measurements, compliance years and potential penalties. Baker's role again looked less like selling a shiny object and more like translating a changing rulebook into decisions about a particular roof.
The ambition beneath the array
Baker has consistently joined climate action to economic participation: electricity savings for community institutions, local jobs, community ownership, employee equity. In 2019, he argued that concentrated solar development in overlooked communities could create both savings and an economic stake in energy production. Resonant's subsequent work has supplied the nouns behind that sentence - churches, schools, apartment buildings, nonprofits, meters, roofs.
This is not the frictionless future promised by a product launch. It is construction, finance and public policy, three professions that keep calendars for a reason. Projects stall. Incentives change. Roofs reveal their age. Lenders require signatures. The attraction of Baker's approach is that it does not treat those complications as evidence that underserved customers are unready. It treats them as the job.
The solar panel remains the visible proof, a dark rectangle catching light above the street. But the more interesting artifact may be the route that brought it there: a founder's abandoned biogas plan, a cooperative apprenticeship, a church that waited five years, a financing partner, a portfolio spreadsheet, a policy comment, an employee who became an owner.
Baker's career suggests a durable rule for climate builders. The transition will not be judged only by how many machines it installs. It will also be judged by which buildings received them, who could afford to say yes, and where the savings went afterward. The roof keeps the hardware. The community should keep more of the value.