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BOSTON — With thousands of residents still in the dark after a massive blizzard, the Massachusetts House voted Thursday to advance a bill to address the high utility bills that are taking a deeper cut of personal budgets across the state.
The House bill seeks to cut roughly $1 billion from Mass Save, the energy efficiency program geared toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Mass Save is funded by a charge on customers’ utility bills. The legislation targets Mass Save’s marketing and administrative budgets.
The wide-ranging bill also addresses nuclear energy, offshore wind, and solar power.
The House passed the bill 128-27 just before 10:15 p.m. Thursday. Democratic Reps. Mike Connolly of Cambridge and Erika Uyterhoeven of Somerville voted with the Republican caucus in opposition to the bill, while independent Rep. Susannah Whipps voted in favor.
House leaders defended the bill after a closed-door caucus Thursday, speaking with reporters inside Speaker Ron Mariano’s office. That unusual move was prompted by protesters who’d filled the hallways, upset about the proposed cuts to Mass Save.
Environmental activists argue that the House’s cut to Mass Save would “devastate” the program and grind it to a halt.
Mark Cusack, chair of the House’s energy committee, described the reduction as “a one-year pause” and the cut as “focused on the administrative and marketing budgets, which are bloated.” He said the cuts don’t target Mass Save’s energy programs.
“This is still going to be the second-largest program in the country, and still the highest per capita in the country,” Cusack said. Of the cuts, he said, “I don’t think it’s going to kill the program or cost people anything. It’s going to be a savings to the ratepayers in the short term and then making sure the program actually works in the long term.”
Mariano cited Rep. Mark Sylvia, D-Fairhaven, as a supporter of the bill. Sylvia was commissioner of the Department of Energy Resources and an energy undersecretary under former Gov. Deval Patrick.
“We had a former chairman of this whole thing under the Patrick administration get up and say that it is time to look at this,” Mariano said. “So that gives me some confidence in the fact that even the people who have administered this program realize it doesn’t go as smoothly as we would like it to go.”
House Ways and Means Chairman Aaron Michlewitz said he expects Bay Staters will see “immediate cost savings” as a result of Mass Save cuts. Customers would also get rebates when electric utilities and energy suppliers are penalized for not purchasing enough renewable energy. Those provisions and others are anticipated to save ratepayers almost $3 billion, according to the Ways and Means Committee.
Environmental groups concerned about Mass Save cut
But environmental and climate activists expressed concern over the proposed bite out of Mass Save.
By the time the bill could pass, there would be about a year left in Mass Save’s 2025-2027 three-year plan, according to Vice President for Climate and Energy at the Conservation Law Foundation Caitlin Peale Sloan.
“Cutting a billion at that point just, like, stops the program dead. That would basically be the entire rest of the budget,” she said.
While “there’s a lot to like in this bill,” director of state program implementation at the Acadia Center, Kyle Murray, said, “The cuts to Mass Save are this big beacon that is really, really distressing to see.” The cut would “devastate” Mass Save and have “significant spillover” into other parts of the program outside of the administration and marketing, he added. “There is not a billion dollars in those departments that’s going to be there in the last year of the program,” Murray said.
“People have focused on the costs quite a bit, but not on the benefits. From 2016 to 2024, without Mass Save, on purely electric and gas supply and infrastructure costs, we would have had to pay $16 billion, if Mass Save didn’t exist,” Murray continued. “We spent $8 billion on Mass Save during that period. That’s a benefit that’s on every ratepayer.”
Bill addresses nuclear energy, offshore wind; drops climate goal change
Energy costs and affordability have become a central issue on Beacon Hill and in the 2026 gubernatorial race. Gov. Maura Healey filed her own energy affordability plan in May 2025. In January, she announced that the state would spend $180 million to temporarily reduce residential electric and gas bills this winter. The median Massachusetts household spent 3% of its income on energy bills in 2024, the state said in its most recent climate report card.
Just over half of the Ways and Means Committee members voted to advance the bill on Tuesday. Eighteen members of the 35-person panel gave it a ’yes’ vote, while 10 representatives neither supported nor opposed it, and seven representatives are listed under “no action” on the bill.
The bill would also expand clean energy procurement authority, ease political barriers to nuclear development by repealing a voter law that placed restrictions on it, and delay an offshore wind contracting deadline by two years to 2029.
Massachusetts has been on a decade-long quest for offshore wind power and so far has landed one lasting contract for about 800 megawatts: with Vineyard Wind, which is nearing completion and generating power for the electrical grid.
The bill is a redraft of legislation that the House’s energy committee supported in November. But it does not include the committee’s proposal to change the state’s binding mandate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% below 1990 levels by 2030. House leadership pulled back that version of the bill after strong opposition from environmental and climate groups. Based on 2022 data (the most recent data), Massachusetts has seen a 26% reduction in statewide gross emissions since 1990.
Sierra Club still critical of bill
Vick Mohanka, director of Sierra Club Massachusetts, told The Light on Wednesday night that the new bill is an improvement over the November version.
“There’s a lot of proposals in there that we were strongly against before that were removed. That’s good,” Mohanka said.
But he said the Sierra Club strongly opposes the new proposal to cut Mass Save.
“They’re calling it an affordability bill, but it’s not doing anything about our distribution costs,” Mohanka added. “It’s not doing something about gas infrastructure costs or ratepayer-funded lobbying, so some of the biggest drivers of higher energy bills are just completely ignored in this bill.”
Reporters on Thursday also pressed House leaders on what was not included in the bill, noting that Healey’s energy proposal contained a provision limiting utilities’ ability to recover lobbying costs from ratepayers.
“It’s more complicated. It’s a nice PR hit,” Cusack said. “In terms of any meaningful savings? No.”
While environmental activists took Cusack to task in the fall for suggesting the state back off of its 2030 commitment, the local leader of the National Federation of Independent Business said Thursday that’s exactly what his small business members want to see.
“Today’s energy reform bill includes some positive steps towards affordability like reducing the Mass Save budget,” said Christopher Carlozzi, NFIB state director in Massachusetts, “but until Beacon Hill addresses the carbon reduction mandates, problems will persist.
“Massachusetts policymakers must ultimately reconsider the state’s self-imposed 2030 and 2050 carbon reduction mandates, or real relief from skyrocketing energy bills will become a recurring challenge,” Carlozzi added.
If or when the Senate takes up the issue of energy and affordability, that chamber’s bill seems unlikely to concede the state’s 2030 decarbonization target.
“I believe that we need to continue to balance our climate goals and our goals to make energy more affordable,” Senate President Karen Spilka said Wednesday. “I will not back off for our climate. I was one of the original two lead sponsors of the Global Warming Solutions Act years ago, and I still believe in those goals. We need to keep them forefront and we need to keep working for them. Our planet, our children, our children’s children depend upon that. It’s just too important.”
Boston University Statehouse reporter Jamie Perkins contributed reporting for The Light.