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Just about everyone in Massachusetts agrees: Energy bills are too damn high.
Natural gas prices in the state rose 70% between 2020 and 2025, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and its residential electricity rates are the third highest in the country, behind only California and Hawaii. Some residents are making hard choices between paying their utility bills and buying food or health care necessities.
It is almost inevitable that the issue of affordability rather than climate change will dominate energy-policy conversations in the state — and throughout the high-priced New England region — this year.
“It’s going to be the focus for both Democrats and Republicans, those kitchen-table, pocketbook issues,” said Dan Dolan, president of trade group the New England Power Generators Association. “Both on the gas and the electric side, utility bill concerns are going to be front-of-mind.”
Massachusetts isn’t alone in this feeling. Across the nation, utility bills are rising far faster than inflation, and energy affordability is becoming a major political issue, propelling Democrats in several states to victory in last November’s elections. But in Massachusetts, sky-high bills are colliding with critical questions about the region’s future energy supply. The Trump administration has waged an unrelenting attack on the offshore wind developments the region was counting on to deliver new electricity, and has worsened the prospects for solar, too, by slashing tax incentives and grant programs.
“It’s supply and demand, and you’re taking away a lot of the supply that was going to be coming online in Massachusetts,” said James Van Nostrand, policy director at nonprofit organization The Future of Heat Initiative and the former chair of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities. “How do you solve that?”
While everyone acknowledges the problem, there is far less consensus on what the root causes are or how to fix them. Some on both sides of the aisle blame the cost of building renewable energy and the transmission lines needed to carry it. Others point to volatile natural gas prices and the expense of replacing aging pipes. Third-party electricity suppliers that lure unsophisticated consumers into high-priced power contracts are also exacerbating matters, say many advocates. Utilities’ profit margins are under scrutiny as well.
For elected officials, the timing makes the conversation both more urgent and more complex: All six New England governors’ seats and more than 1,200 state legislator positions across the region will be up for election this fall.
A major part of the challenge is that there are more than two sides to the argument. Almost no one is advocating for a full return to fossil-fueled power plants or for a renewables-only grid. But the spaces in between are filled with permutations and possibilities that are difficult to sum up and sell. “Affordability” is being used to justify widely divergent energy proposals, including plans that opponents say could make the problem worse or which trade off climate goals in the name of bringing down costs.
“The long-term solutions are complicated and nuanced, and don’t lend themselves neatly to those political debates,” Dolan said.
Though Democrats control the Massachusetts legislature by vast margins, not everyone is on the same page about how to tackle the affordability crisis.
In March 2025, Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat who is up for reelection, unveiled her energy-affordability agenda. It includes plans to create the state’s first discount rate for moderate-income households, expand tiered rates for low-income customers, and help residents access existing programs that could help them trim their bills. Two months later, she introduced a sprawling energy-affordability bill she said would save residents about $10 billion over the next 10 years through measures like reducing bill charges, making sure utilities don’t pass certain expenses on to customers, and removing barriers for nuclear development.
Last month, state utility regulators, at Healey’s request, opened an investigation into electricity and gas delivery costs, with an eye to determining if any charges can be removed, consolidated, or redesigned to save consumers money.
But in November, Democratic state Rep. Mark Cusack, House chair of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy, countered Healey’s proposal with his own package that included many of the same provisions — alongside several that set off alarm bells in the clean-energy community.
The bill, which was approved by Cusack’s committee on a 7-0 vote, called for making the state’s 2030 emissions target nonbinding, slashing funding for energy-efficiency programming, and limiting climate and clean-energy initiatives that impact customers’ utility bills.
The existence of these provisions signals how far concerns about affordability have shifted the conversation in the state, said Paula García, senior manager of energy justice research and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“This thing of revisiting the climate commitments that the state has in place was not something that was being discussed at the beginning of last year,” she said.
Cusack’s bill, which is widely expected to be the vehicle for energy legislation this session, is now in the House Ways and Means Committee. The measure will be revised there before potentially advancing to a floor vote that could send it to the Senate.
The bill’s final form will depend in large part on who can come up with a clean, compelling narrative to back their position, said advocates and observers. Some worry that efforts to paint energy efficiency and renewable energy as the culprits behind rising bills have gotten a head start.
“We allowed fossil-fuel interests to drive the narrative that it’s all those clean and green things,” Kyle Murray, director of state program implementation at the nonprofit Acadia Center. “Unfortunately, that’s what’s taken hold.”
The idea has a sort of commonsense allure: After all, energy bills have risen at the same time as Massachusetts has been increasing its focus on renewable energy development and expanding its energy-efficiency programming, so it’s not difficult to imagine a connection between these trends. The flames have been fanned by federal officials like Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who claims wind and solar are driving up costs for the states reliant on them.
Local renewable-energy opponents continue to push this interpretation of the affordability crisis. Last week, nonprofit Always On Energy Research released a report arguing that a switch to renewable power would cost New England up to $700 billion more by 2050 than leaning on natural gas or nuclear power plants. The analysis was sponsored by right-wing organizations, including the Yankee Institute, Fiscal Alliance Foundation, and Americans for Prosperity Foundation.
Murray called the report’s numbers “magical thinking, completely at odds with reality.” Acadia Center is attempting to counter that argument with a new series of explainers outlining its analysis of what is driving volatile energy prices, with a strong emphasis on the cost of natural gas and the benefits of renewables. Other advocates also say they will be working on educating lawmakers about the complex subject and urging them to keep up the push for clean energy.
“So much of the issue is whose message is being received well,” Murray said. “We’re going to make a more concerted effort this year.”
The U.S. House just voted to cancel efficiency standards for new manufactured homes — a move that could hit especially hard in the Southeast, where such housing is common and energy insecurity is high.
The measure would rescind 2022 criteria for insulation, air sealing, and other energy-saving features in prefabricated, or mobile, homes, restoring weaker standards more than 30 years old. The legislation comes as utility bills are rising fast nationwide — and if it is passed by the Senate and signed into law, it could cost households in double-wide houses hundreds more per year in increased electricity costs.
“The very first energy bill that the House of Representatives passed this year would increase energy costs on some of the households and families in the United States that are most struggling to make ends meet,” said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director with the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “This will have more harmful impacts in the Southeast than anywhere else in the country.”
Of the 4.7 million prefab homes delivered nationwide in recent decades, more than half are in just 10 southern states. Texas leads the country, with nearly 600,000 units, and North Carolina is second, with over 330,000, according to the U.S. Census.
Manufactured homes are exempt from state and local energy codes, and older models are notoriously energy inefficient, with thin insulation, drafty windows and doors, and often outdated modes of heating and cooling. Those who live in manufactured homes also tend to have less income than those in site-built varieties, making these needlessly high energy costs even harder to handle.
“Utility costs can be in the several hundred dollars for folks in a manufactured house,” said Claire Williamson, senior energy policy advocate at the North Carolina Justice Center, which advocates for low-income families. She added that “$300, $400, even $500 a month in peak costs is not trivial.”
The prefabricated homes exacerbate energy insecurity in the Southeast, which is the most energy-burdened region in the country: One in three households in the region struggles to pay their utility bills, according to the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last updated standards for manufactured homes in 1994. In 2007, a bipartisan law directed the Department of Energy to issue more protective rules. In 2022, the Biden administration finally did so, but the new criteria were paused last summer by the Trump administration.
The Manufactured Housing Institute, the trade group for prefabricated home builders, has long fought against the stricter standards, which it argues are too costly, confusing, and bureaucratic.
The bipartisan bill that passed the House last week largely gives the builders what they want, restoring the 1994 standards and preventing the Department of Energy from ever issuing stronger rules.
The 2022 rules were expected to cost an average of $4,222 per double-wide home up front but pay for themselves in the form of lower energy bills in less than five years. For single-wide units, the additional up-front costs were pegged at $660, which households would recoup within one year.
“This is so clearly about the homebuilder special interests,” Williamson said, “and has nothing to do with ensuring better, more affordable housing for people.”
About half of all factory-made homes are already built to efficiency standards that are much stricter than those rescinded by the House, said Grant Beck, vice president of strategic partnerships at Next Step Network, a Kentucky-based nonprofit that supports ownership of prefab homes.
This fact shows that better-built manufactured homes can benefit the industry and consumers alike, say affordability advocates, far better than the bill that’s now before the Senate.
“We understand that we’re in an affordability crisis, particularly with relation to housing and first-time home buyers trying to enter the market,” Beck said. “However, the lower purchase price on a home for a family is eroded if they’re unable to make monthly payments due to high and rising energy costs.”
Funding for Rhode Island’s energy-efficiency programs could be cut by more than $42 million next year in an effort to rein in residents’ soaring power bills. That rollback would deprive the state of more than $90 million in benefits and potentially eliminate hundreds of jobs while creating only modest up-front savings, a new analysis finds.
Rhode Island Energy, the utility that administers the state’s energy-efficiency offerings, has proposed to slash spending on that front by 18% compared to last year and more than 30% compared to the budget originally projected in the nonbinding three-year plan introduced in 2023. If approved, the cuts will save the average household $1.87 per month, according to Rhode Island Energy.
The result of these changes, according to climate action nonprofit Acadia Center, would be more expensive electricity and more exposure to volatile natural gas prices in the long run.
“Energy efficiency is a tool for suppressing supply costs, for suppressing infrastructure costs in the long-term,” said Emily Koo, Acadia Center’s program director for Rhode Island and one of the authors of the group’s analysis. “I am not seeing our leaders think beyond the immediate.”
Rhode Island has traditionally been a leader in energy-efficiency programming. Over the past 15 years, the state has repeatedly placed among the top 10 states in the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy’s annual energy-efficiency scorecard. Since 2009, the state has spent more than $2 billion on efficiency incentives and services, yielding more than $6 billion in environmental and social benefits.
Now, however, the dynamics of energy markets are creating new obstacles. Nationwide, electricity costs have gone up at twice the rate of inflation over the past year, and gas prices have increased by more than four times the inflation rate. Rhode Island, like other New England states, has the added difficulty of already having some of the highest electricity rates in the country. Add in cold Northeastern winters, and the state is girding for an expensive season ahead.
As in neighboring states, regulators, elected officials, and utilities in Rhode Island are scrambling for ways to provide some relief for residents and businesses. These efforts have increasingly looked to the bill fees that fund renewable energy incentives and energy-efficiency programs as possible targets for quick, if small, bill reductions. In Maine, for example, leaders from both sides of the aisle have sought to lower incentives for customers and community solar developments that send power back to the grid, and in Massachusetts, utility regulators ordered energy-efficiency administrators to cut $500 million from a planned $5 billion three-year budget.
Now, Rhode Island Energy is proposing rollbacks of its own, saying that its latest plan prioritizes customer affordability. The company has the support of the Rhode Island Division of Public Utilities and Carriers, which points to the growth in accounts with overdue utility bills to bolster its argument that the changes will provide needed relief to consumers.
“There is simply a financial limit as to how much cost the ratepayers can bear,” the department wrote in its public comments on the proposal.
Advocates, however, say the approach is short-sighted.
“This is weaker. It’s a retreat,” said Larry Chretien, executive director of the nonprofit Green Energy Consumers Alliance, which opposes the proposed cuts. “It just feeds into the narrative — that we don’t accept — that ratepayers aren’t seeing benefits from energy efficiency.”
Rhode Island’s energy-efficiency offerings include home energy assessments, weatherization services, rebates on energy-saving appliances and heating and cooling systems, and contractor training. Residents and businesses that take advantage of these programs generally save money by reducing their energy use.
The programs also create savings for the average consumer, whether or not they participate. Because the improvements slow energy consumption, they allow utilities to build less pricey infrastructure, the cost of which is passed on to customers. Efficiency measures can also lower peak demand, reducing the need to buy costlier, dirtier power from peaker plants. In Rhode Island, efficiency programs lowered electricity use 5% between 2005 and 2024; without these interventions, use would have increased 15%, according to an annual state report.
Advocates, therefore, argue that Rhode Island Energy’s plan to shrink energy-efficiency spending won’t actually result in more affordable power in the long run.
“You spend money on energy efficiency or you’re going to spend even more money on power supply,” said Forest Bradley-Wright, state and utility director for the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
Acadia Center’s analysis also finds that more than 800 jobs in the energy-efficiency sector could be at risk if the cuts are adopted.
The draft plan has been through multiple iterations; the most recent version was released on Sept. 5. The state energy-efficiency council is expected to vote on the proposal at its Sept. 25 meeting. The plan will then go to utility regulators for final approval.
Advocates say they intend to keep pushing for high funding levels until the process concludes.
“The benefits we’re experiencing today are already translating into lower bills,” Bradley-Wright said. “There’s a track record of success, but let’s not take it for granted.”
Talia Boyd was spending over $300 a month to keep her home just outside Asheville, North Carolina, cool this summer. It was an enormous sum for the single-wide trailer she shares with her baby daughter and teenage son.
“We constantly kept ceiling fans going, and I had to get AC units,” she said — multiple ones that ran 24/7 to replace the cold air seeping out from gaps around the windows.
But now, the air leaks have been sealed, a door has been replaced, and a new heat pump has been installed — all at no cost to Boyd. Her monthly utility bill from Duke Energy has been cut in half, she said.
The improvements are thanks to Energy Savers Network, a small nonprofit that serves Buncombe County, where Boyd lives, along with neighboring counties Henderson, Haywood, and Madison.
“They really came out and they helped,” said Boyd, who works in home health care. “They talked. They took measurements. They walked through the whole trailer. I really appreciate the help, and I would love to spread the word.”
Boyd’s home is among the roughly 1,400 that Energy Savers Network has assisted with weatherization since its inception in late 2016. Across the state in the same time frame, thousands of other households have received similar services, mostly from community action agencies deploying federal dollars.
But Boyd’s story is somewhat unique. She’s in a smaller subset of people who’ve benefited from a Duke initiative meant not just to aid the energy burdened in times of crisis, but to permanently reduce their electricity use through home efficiency improvements.
And with politicians at the state and national levels turning against the clean energy transition in low-income communities and elsewhere, Boyd’s experience is rare good news that advocates hope can continue to be replicated.
Energy Savers Network found Boyd through Duke’s Customer Assistance Program. Part of a side deal the utility struck in 2023 to lessen the blow of its rate hikes, the program offers a monthly credit of up to $42 on bills for households at or below 150% of the federal poverty level — about $50,000 for a family of four.
In 2024, Duke began automatically providing the credit to any customers who’d benefited in the prior year from one of two buckets of federal aid: the Crisis Intervention Program, designed to prevent or reverse life-threatening emergencies like utility shutoffs, or the Low-Income Energy Assistance Program, which offers one-time payments to help households with heating bills.
North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services manages the two funds and has a data-sharing agreement with Duke, which then enrolls customers in its program — a process that has minimized administrative expenses such as vetting participants for eligibility.
And though in its first year the bill assistance benefited less than half the number of households forecast, experts say that’s because funding for the two buckets of federal aid dropped, not because the need isn’t great. Advocates remain bullish about the prospect for Duke to serve 100,000 customers or more annually.
Totaling over $500 for a year, the bill credit alone is vital for families struggling to make ends meet, aid groups say.
But Boyd’s case demonstrates the full potential of the Customer Assistance Program: Virtually every household receiving help gets referred to a local entity that can assess homes and perform free efficiency upgrades, reducing energy burdens beyond the 12 months of financial aid.
The brainchild and passion project of former financial and utility consultant Brad Rouse, Energy Savers has undergone a few iterations over its nine years of existence. Its throughline is providing energy-efficiency retrofits, usually in a day’s time, via a team of volunteers guided by a professional.
When everything is running smoothly, that means the group can perform upgrades — such as adding insulation and sealing air leaks — for at least three homes a week, according to Rouse. But in its early years, Energy Savers sometimes struggled to meet that mark.
“The problem is we had a lot of client cancellations,” said Rouse, who today serves as Energy Savers’ executive director. If they were last-minute, the group didn’t always have a backup client ready to take advantage of assembled volunteers and staff. In that case, Rouse said, “we lose the day.”
But now, the organization has almost eliminated that problem. “The Duke Customer Assistance referral is one big reason why,” he said.
That’s because the utility sends so many referrals that it’s easier to find clients who will be ready by the time the Energy Savers team arrives, reducing the likelihood of cancellations. And when a client does fall through, there’s a waiting list ready to be tapped.
The group identifies households in need through multiple channels, including farmers markets, community events, and word of mouth. But its largest source of referrals these days is the Customer Assistance Program, said Steffi Rausch, director of operations.
“We send out a bulk mailing to [potential clients] first and then we try to follow up with phone calls to get them scheduled,” Rausch said.
Boyd, for instance, first got help paying her utility bills through Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry, which accessed one of the federal crisis assistance funds for her. She was soon enrolled in Duke’s $42 bill-credit program and then referred to Energy Savers. “They popped up at my doorstep,” Boyd said.
In the last 11 months, 26% of Energy Savers’ referrals have come from the Duke Customer Assistance Program, according to Rausch. So far, 36 of those referred families have made it through the weatherization process.
“I’m very impressed with Duke at this point,” Rausch said. The utility, which funds the majority of the services provided by Energy Savers, always makes sure the group gets reimbursed, she said. “We’ve never been stuck with the bill.”
To be sure, Duke and advocates for low-income customers are still working out kinks in the bill-credit scheme. One challenge is waning funding for the two federal crisis assistance initiatives that are used to automatically enroll individuals in the Customer Assistance Program. Another hurdle is connecting the dots for recipients, who often don’t realize they’re getting the bill credit or that they’re getting referred to groups like Energy Savers.
Most of all, advocates are mindful that the Customer Assistance Program is in the middle of a three-year pilot phase, and they want to extend it one way or another — as a feature of Duke’s next three-year rate increase, as a condition of the merger of the company’s two North Carolina utilities, or as part of some other case before state regulators.
Boyd knows as well as advocates that the need for long-lasting energy savings is substantial. She’s now trying to get help for her 93-year-old Aunt Viola, whose electricity bill tops $400 a month.
“It’s only her in the house,“ Boyd said. “She could really use this program.”
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