Elks See Array as Step to Community-Based Power – The Provincetown Independent

Posted on July 2, 2026 by Now.Solar

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EASTHAM — Alongside pig roasts, weekly Bingo nights, Wednesday night live music shows, and outdoor cookouts, the Orleans-Eastham Elks Lodge is piloting a new program at its home just off Route 6: solar power generation.
The lofted nearly one-acre array that doubles as a covered parking lot should this month begin generating around 390,000 watts of solar energy at peak capacity — enough to power about 50 homes year-round, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Equivalency Calculator.
Luminous Solar, a subsidiary of MyGeneration Energy, built the array on Elks-owned land as part of an arrangement that Brian Tilton, former president of the lodge who spearheaded the project, hopes will benefit both the nonprofit Elks and Eastham residents.
The project’s permits are in hand, said current Elks president Bob Harnett. “Now we are just waiting on Eversource.”
This is the first ground-mounted solar array of its size in Eastham, said Town Planner Paul Lagg. And because of its size, the Elks array is considered utility-scale, meaning that rather than fueling only the Elks Lodge, it will plug into the wider renewable energy grid.
Exactly how that will work has been a moving target, according to Tilton, because last summer, with construction underway, the Trump administration defunded the Solar for All program that had shaped state regulations and allowances that in turn underpinned the Elks’ plans.
Tilton said the original goal was for the Elks to participate in something called the Mass. Community Shared Solar (CSS) program, which would have meant receiving a monthly payment for the lease of the space to the solar developer and buying the energy produced by the array back at a 10-percent discount. The program would have also allowed the Elks to offer that energy at a reduced cost to community members through a solar farm subscription model.
According to data collected by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s production tracking system, only about 8 percent of homes in Eastham have solar panels.
Now, without the CSS program, Tilton says that the revised plan for the lodge’s array is for Luminous Solar to sell the energy to Eversource, which will construct a transformer and set of power lines near the structure to enable it to resell the power to local homeowners at market price. In exchange, Luminous Solar has agreed to pay a higher rent to the Elks Lodge for the land.
Tilton says the lodge plans to use that rent money to buy back full ownership of the array, allowing them to function eventually much in the way the solar farm approach would have allowed.
“In seven years, the lease will have paid for itself through their program, which means we can buy the system from them,” Tilton said. “If we have the people to maintain it, and the smarts in the finance department to not abuse it and make it work out right,” that, he said, would return the Elks to their community solar vision.
Harnett said he hopes savings on electricity will be used to strengthen the Elks usual programing.
Tilton said he’s been campaigning for an array of this magnitude in his hometown for 15 years but got the green light from the Elks only last summer. He sees serving as a utility of sorts as a way to further the Elks Lodge’s community service mission.
“All of the energy that we generate, we want it to go back into the people and the community that we call home,” Tilton said.
Tilton has a construction advising company called the Building Inspector of Cape Cod. He was born in Eastham but lived in Nevada in the late 1990s and early 2000s. There, working first in insurance and then as a roughneck, pumper, and derrick hand on oil wells in the Railroad Valley inspired his commitment to renewable energy.
“I lived off the grid for seven years in rural Nevada,” Tilton said. “I had solar and wind turbines that sustained me, and they were renewable sources that were good for the environment.”
The array covers about 55 parking spots in what was a sunny blacktop at the lodge. More parking and shade are two plusses, from Tilton’s point of view. The Elks Lodge is talking with Eversource about adding an electric vehicle charging station in the lot, he said.
When it begins producing, it will be the largest privately owned solar array in Eastham and one of the largest arrays in the county, similar in size to developments like the Shepley Wood Products solar farm near Barnstable Airport. With 616 panels, the lodge’s array is bigger than the 26-panel array at the dump in Provincetown, though not as big as Wellfleet’s, which has 2,358 panels, or Eastham’s 2,500 panel setup.
Tom McNellis, chair of the Eastham Energy and Climate Action Committee, said that he thinks the Elks Lodge’s solar farm model could help increase solar use in the long term. Despite his committee’s efforts, the expiration of the federal residential credit system on Dec. 31, 2025 — another result of the defunding of Solar for All — has slowed solar panel purchases and private solar development in the town, he said.
McNellis said the Elks project also aims to include battery storage. And that, he said, “is a big deal, because it evens out the load on the grid, which provides Eastham with more self-resiliency.”
Lagg said that the town, which has adopted a climate action plan as part of its five-year strategy, could get involved in private-public collaborations to develop renewable energy. “We are open to helping work with private projects that work for mutual benefit and for community benefit,” he said. He doesn’t see the Elks project as setting a precedent in terms of scale, however.
He’s aware that large arrays can be intrusive, he said. “We’ll want to enact some guardrails that protect against detrimental impact to land, the environment, or the wider beauty of this place,” said Lagg.
Until then, the Orleans-Eastham Elks Lodge is eager to expand its mission of “Elks Care, Elks Share” to the renewable energy sphere. “We have all of these community programs,” Tilton said.  “This is another way to reinvest.”
“Tuesdays are our Bingo night,” Tilton added. “It’s the only Bingo night from Provincetown to Hyannis.”
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Tagged With: , Filed Under: Eastham, Featured, News, Towns
Zoya Haq is a 2026 summer reporting fellow supported by the Independent’s nonprofit partner the Local Journalism Project. Zoya attends Yale University and is the investigations editor at the Yale Daily News. (More about Zoya)
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