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A home electrification and solar pilot program for lower-income Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard residents is cutting participants’ energy bills nearly 60% and is expected to inform Massachusetts’ ongoing efforts to bring renewable energy and energy efficiency to all households.
“What the commonwealth has to have available, if we’re going to even hope to achieve our climate goals, is that there have to be options for people at every income level,” said Maggie Downey, chief administrative officer of the Cape Light Compact, the organization that administered the pilot.
The program, known as the Cape and Vineyard Electrification Offering, gave solar panels to all 55 participating households and heat pumps to 45 of those, most at no cost and some with a low co-payment, depending on income levels. Twelve households also received batteries, and some got electric dryers and stoves, to transition the homes completely off fossil fuels. Installations began in January 2024, and the final one wrapped up in May 2025.
The results: The average household is saving some $150 per month on energy costs and reducing net electricity use by 59% by getting much of its needed power from the on-site solar panels, according to an analysis published by the consultancy Guidehouse at the end of last month. Perhaps unsurprisingly, participating residents are quite satisfied with these outcomes, giving the program an exceptionally good “net promoter score” of 71%.
“My costs are drastically lower,” said Judy Welch, a homeowner in the Cape Cod town of Chatham who was one of the first folks to sign on for the upgrades. “In the summer now, I don’t have any bills, and I have the air conditioning on the whole time.” Her winter energy bills have also dropped to nearly zero thanks to the solar-powered heat pumps; previously, Welch paid around $500 a month to run electric baseboard heating.
Massachusetts has long had strong incentives for renewable energy and been a leader in policies promoting energy efficiency. The state has had less success, however, in helping lower-income households realize the benefits of these measures. At the same time, Massachusetts residents — especially those who make less money — face some of the highest energy burdens in the country. On Cape Cod, households making less than one-third of the area median income spent an average of 27% of their income on energy as of 2023, according to data from the U.S. Department of Energy. (An updated figure is unavailable because the federal tool that provided this data is no longer live.)
The Cape and Vineyard Electrification Offering was conceived of as a way to overcome the sometimes unmanageable up-front cost of efficiency and clean energy upgrades, and to amplify the impact of individual technologies by deploying them together. Solar panels would keep down the cost of operating heat pumps, and batteries would maximize the amount of zero-cost electricity available to each home.
“It’s all bundled for the participant in a way that makes sense and optimizes all these different systems and combines them through one program,” said Todd Olinsky-Paul, senior project director for the Clean Energy Group, a Vermont-based nonprofit that advocates for a just energy transition. “I haven’t seen that anywhere else.”
The pilot was designed and offered by the Cape Light Compact, a unique regional organization that negotiates electric supply prices and administers energy-efficiency programming for the 21 towns on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. The compact proposed versions of the pilot in 2018, 2020, and 2021, before the state gave it the go-ahead in 2023.
The version that was finally approved called for 100 homes to participate in the pilot. As the effort rolled out, however, planners realized how challenging it is to deploy a standard package to houses with a wide range of ages and conditions. In some cases, interested homeowners decided against participation when they realized they would have to pay more than they hoped or discovered their yards were too shaded to generate much solar power. Some who did participate needed mold remediation or roof replacements; others were unable to receive batteries because they didn’t have basements.
“There is really no single solution for these questions,” Downey said. “It is so site-specific and customer-specific.”
Ultimately, 55 homes enrolled, as the unanticipated roadblocks raised the expected cost of serving each participant. On average, the Cape Light Compact spent about $45,700 on each heat pump installation, $30,000 on each solar installation, and $33,000 on each battery system, according to preliminary calculations.
These figures raised some questions at a recent meeting of the compact’s governing board, at which the Guidehouse report was presented. Downey acknowledged the cost, but pointed out that the need to transition off fossil fuels is inevitable — and comes with a price tag.
“You cannot hide the expense of what we have in front of us to deal with,” she told the board.
The report offers suggestions for improving any future iterations of the initiative. Pilot participants were prohibited from enrolling their solar systems in the state’s net-metering offering, and therefore their compensation for excess energy sent back into the grid was between 5 cents and 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, rather than at least 25 cents per kilowatt-hour. The evaluation suggests that future programs should allow the use of net metering to improve financial benefits even further. The report also suggests improving coordination among the various installers involved to make the process run more smoothly for participants.
The Cape Light Compact will present the results at the August meeting of the state Energy-Efficiency Advisory Council, the group responsible for writing Massachusetts’ triennial energy-efficiency plan. From there, the council will decide how to use the information to guide future equity-focused electrification efforts and determine the appropriate amount of financial support for households at different income levels.
“The results show that there are savings, and that energy burdens are reduced by more than 50%, when you pair it all with solar,” Downey said. “If we want to have low- to moderate-income customers come with us, we need to have options — that’s all part of the conversation.”
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