Governor Maura Healey is asking the Trump administration to accelerate federal approval of a natural gas pipeline expansion she spent years blocking, according to an October 1 letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The request comes roughly one month before the November 2026 general election, in which energy costs have become a central campaign issue. Healey, who as attorney general successfully prevented two earlier pipeline projects and publicly declared in 2022 that she "stopped two gas pipelines from coming into this state," is now urging Wright to clear reviews for Enbridge's Algonquin Reliable Affordable Resilient Enhancement project, known as Project RARE.
The proposed expansion would deliver gas to approximately 600,000 customers and reduce bills by roughly $40 million annually, or about $400 million across the decade-long Eversource contracts approved by the state Department of Public Utilities in January, according to Healey's office. Massachusetts residential electricity averaged about 30.48 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025, approximately 76 percent above the national average and trailing only Hawaii and California. Natural gas supplied about 74.7 percent of the state's in-state electricity generation in 2024, while solar contributed 10.9 percent, hydro 3.8 percent, and wind just 0.9 percent. During the prolonged cold snap of winter 2025–26, ISO New England reported that pipelines hit capacity constraints, LNG sendout roughly doubled compared to the prior winter, and oil generation averaged about 4,000 megawatts per hour for more than two weeks in late January and early February as dual-fuel plants switched off gas. Peak winter demand reached about 20,200 megawatts, with solar and wind contribution during those cold, high-demand hours described as marginal.
As attorney general, Healey released a 2015 study arguing Massachusetts could meet reliability needs without additional gas capacity and that electric ratepayers shouldn't finance pipelines. She opposed Kinder Morgan's Northeast Energy Direct and Spectra's Access Northeast, and her office successfully argued before the Supreme Judicial Court in 2016 that the Baker administration couldn't use electric-ratepayer tariffs to fund pipeline capacity. After that ruling, she said developers would need to find financing beyond ratepayers' wallets and later treated the outcome as a credential. In a December 2025 NBC Boston interview, she called the earlier projects a "lousy deal" because ratepayers would have paid. Her office's defense has been that companies could have built the lines if they financed them independently. Project RARE is structured exactly that way: developer-funded, with utilities contracting for supply rather than electric customers underwriting construction.
The reversal highlights a broader mismatch the report identifies: Massachusetts has set high renewable targets but closed its last nuclear plant, Pilgrim, in May 2019, leaving the state consuming about twice the electricity it generates. Across ISO New England in 2025, natural gas supplied 51 percent of net energy for load, nuclear provided 23 percent, net imports 7 percent, and solar and wind combined contributed just 8 percent. The state's gas system is contracted first to heating customers, making power plants the residual user—precisely the constraint Healey's 2015 study claimed efficiency and demand response could manage without new infrastructure. Wind and solar have expanded, but regional wind output of 4,618 gigawatt-hours in 2025 and Massachusetts utility-scale wind capacity of only a few dozen megawatts haven't replaced firm dispatchable power. Solar's growth is real and mostly behind the meter, lowering midday net load in summer, but it doesn't heat homes or run combined-cycle plants in January. The underlying arithmetic, the report concludes, is already clear: New England still runs on gas, nuclear, and imports, with oil as the winter insurance policy, and stopping pipeline construction didn't replace that stack but instead left the region buying more expensive LNG and burning more oil when temperatures dropped.