December 9, 2025 - Budderfly partner Gilman Brothers won Solar Builder Magazine’s Project of the Year in the 101 kW TO 1 MW category. 

Gilman Brothers Rooftop Solar | 101 kW to 1 MW

Gilman Brothers Rooftop Solar | 101 kW to 1 MW

"The innovation of the Gilman Brothers project lies not only in its technical merits but also in the way the partnership is structured. Through the EaaS approach, Budderfly takes on the project’s design, financing, installation, and long-term management, all at no cost to Gilman Brothers.

Through a 15-year agreement with Budderfly, Gilman Brothers was able to access all the associated benefits of solar while keeping its focus on core manufacturing. This approach helps energy become a managed service, not a constraint.

“The problem with the energy business is … to really bring energy efficiency, it takes heavy upfront investment, and people are unsure of the return on that investment,” explains Al Subbloie, founder and CEO of Budderfly, which is also a Connecticut-based company. “What we’ve done is create a technological platform through our billing that is able to do the measure and verify automatically as part of that investment. By doing so, we have a pretty good degree of predictability that if we’re going to invest X dollars, we’re going to be able to get that back over a period of time, and we bear the entire risk on that, which we should. We’re in the business, we understand the business and honestly we continue to manage and monitor that environment for the full 15 years.”

By using its technology platform and understanding the investment modeling, Subbloie explains that Budderfly is “able to unleash that capital” to make the necessary upfront investment to build a solar system. The result is a mutually beneficial business arrangement for the customer — i.e., Gilman Brothers — and Budderfly over the full 15 years of the EaaS agreement.

“It takes many, many years for us to break even,” Subbloie says. “But in the scheme of 15 years, if we do our job right, we can actually make money, which is important, so that we’re around for the long term.”

Read the full article here.