How KLO MA Works | Keep Lights On Massachusetts

What Is a HERO Hub?

Community-Scale Clean Energy, Built to Be Owned Locally.

Solar generation, battery storage, and intelligent controls — combined into infrastructure designed for municipal ownership, resilience for critical facilities, and decades of local benefit.

A Hub for Energy Resilient Operations (HERO™) is a community-scale energy system combining solar generation, battery storage, and intelligent controls. It’s not a rooftop panel program. It’s infrastructure — built to power municipal buildings, protect critical facilities that cannot lose power, and generate revenue for your community for decades.

More communities participating in the initiative means more resilience, more revenue, and lower costs for everyone.

The Initiative Model

No Community Has to Go It Alone.

The Keep Lights On MA™ initiative allows municipalities to share the costs of feasibility, engineering, and development — while each maintains full ownership of their local assets. Think of it as collective bargaining for energy infrastructure.

Why Together

Each community keeps full ownership of its own HERO Hub. The initiative pools development costs, shares expertise across municipalities, and gives small towns the collective scale they couldn’t access alone.

Why Now

Massachusetts pays among the highest electricity rates in the nation — as much as 70% above the U.S. average — while communities are advancing ambitious Net Zero commitments and state leadership is creating the policy conditions for distributed energy resources to play a larger role in the grid. The window to act is open now.

The Process

Four Phases — At Your Pace.

Phase commitment levels at a glance. Town Meeting authorizes every phase past feasibility — if residents vote no, the process stops.

Phase	What Happens	Your Community’s Commitment
1. Feasibility	Site assessment, load analysis, financial modeling, community engagement.	Low Sign a Feasibility Study Agreement.
2. Go / No-Go Decision	Town Meeting (or council) reviews feasibility findings and votes on whether to authorize the next phase.	Moderate Town Meeting authorization required.
3. Design & Development	Engineering design, permitting, interconnection planning, construction, equipment installation, commissioning.	Full Project underway with community approval.
4. Operations	Ongoing management, optimization, revenue generation, ownership transition.	Ongoing Community earns revenue and builds toward full ownership.

Summer 2026

Demonstration Event

Fall 2026

FSA Conducted

Winter 2026 – Spring 2027

Community Engagement

Spring 2027

Town Meeting Vote

2027–2029

Build & Operate

Funding

How HERO Hubs Are Financed.

A public-private investment structure that brings together municipalities with large scale investors under one umbrella.

Your community’s HERO Hub is financed through the Keep Lights On Fund — a public-private investment structure that brings together municipalities, green banks, tax equity funds, and infrastructure investors to fund design, construction, installation, and long-term operation.

Investors and communities both join the Fund as limited partners. Investors contribute capital and municipalities contribute equity that is comprised of a combination of forgone land lease value and grants as examples. Investors receive the majority of revenue during an initial payback period; communities receive reduced electricity costs and a share of revenue from day one. After that payback period, investors exit and ownership of the HERO Hub transitions to the community.

Specific equity contribution amounts are modeled in the feasibility study and depend on the community’s site selection, energy profile, and chosen financing structure.

The First Investment: Feasibility

The only upfront expense is the feasibility study — less than $100,000 per community, or a fraction of a percent (roughly 0.2–0.3%) of the cost of the microgrid infrastructure itself.

If the project proceeds, this pre-construction cost is reimbursed from project financing proceeds.

Subsequent equity contribution and financing structure are detailed in the feasibility study’s financial model.

Ownership

The Path to Municipal Ownership.

This isn’t a lease. It’s not a power purchase agreement. HERO Hubs are designed so your community builds equity from day one and transitions to full asset ownership over time.

Once ownership transitions, the revenue from electricity sales, grid services, and market participation belongs to your community — to fund municipal services, reduce tax burdens, or be directed wherever your residents decide it’s needed most.

Revenue Stays Local

Your community becomes a limited partner in the Keep Lights On Fund at the outset, meaning you hold an ownership stake from day one — not just a promise of future ownership.

Multi-million dollars in revenue over the 20-year asset lifespan, with detailed financial modeling specific to your community’s sites and energy profile delivered as part of the feasibility study.

The HERO™ Hub Model