October 7, 2026
IMAGINE THAT YOU’RE part of a team charged with crafting the next iteration of one of the largest energy efficiency programs in the country, the budget of which exceeds that of the University of Massachusetts system.
Now add in the fact that the 200 elected officials in the Massachusetts Legislature, could — and very well may — come in at any point between now and January 5, 2027, and blow it all up.
That’s what’s currently playing out.
Mass Save is a program that provides low or no-cost energy efficiency upgrades to homes and businesses around the state with the goal of reducing energy usage and, therefore, monthly bills. To do that, electric and gas customers pay a surcharge to fund the program, which offers home energy assessments, improved insulation, smart thermostats and, increasingly, electric heat pumps to warm and cool buildings.
But a political backlash to Mass Save, amid a rising tide of angst over soaring utility bills, has taken root — and spread to influential members on Beacon Hill. After the House advanced a plan to slash next year’s Mass Save budget by $1 billion and the Senate rejected that proposal, lawmakers are now negotiating whether the program’s budget should be cut, capped, or left to program officials to figure out as it works through a sprawling energy bill that aims to lower prices for ratepayers.
Meanwhile, as that contentious legislative debate lingers, there’s something else happening under the radar: Planning for the next three-year Mass Save cycle is already well underway.
Utilities that administer the program are preparing to submit by the end of March a draft plan that will chart the course for what Mass Save will seek to accomplish between 2028 and 2030.
There’s just one problem. It’s entirely unclear whether and how the Legislature will wade into Mass Save’s budget through the energy bill, threatening to upend all the planning, modeling, stakeholder discussions, and consultant reports that have already been completed to shape the future of the program, which is overseen by the Energy Efficiency Advisory Council.
“This is one great big exercise in holding your breath,” said Steven Miller, founder of LabReNew, a company that helps research and scientific labs reduce their carbon footprint, and a member of the EEAC.
Gov. Maura Healey, who is seeking reelection this year, has also offered little clarity on whether she’s on board with the proposed Mass Save cut and what future direction she wants the program to take.
At a press conference on Monday in Everett where she announced new home heating assistance, Healey demurred several times after being pressed on her stance on the program and her role in legislative negotiations. Instead, she touted her “all of the above” approach to energy to lower prices and “strongly” urged the Legislature to pass the energy affordability package she filed 18 months ago. Her version of that bill left the current Mass Save budget intact, but she did embrace a cap on the program in the future this past summer.
Mass Save’s budget has grown from roughly $3 billion between 2019 and 2021 to $4.5 billion for the current three-year cycle, increasing the fee on customer bills. That’s after the Department of Public Utilities (DPU), which has to approve the plan, decided to reduce the budget proposal for the current Mass Save cycle by $500 million in February 2025, an initial signal of the wariness among some in state government of the burden on ratepayers.
But now, the politics around energy affordability at large and the specific discussions underway in the Legislature have forced those involved in the program’s future to consider the need to recalibrate and prepare for tighter fiscal limits despite looming climate commitments and rising power demand.
“There are new constraints on the budget, and I think that has set up some boundaries for the discussion this time,” said Brooks Winner, Boston’s director of community energy programs who serves on the EEAC. “Obviously, it’s different than it was three years ago. In some ways it’s helping us all be laser focused on what is worth investing in. It’s required us to sharpen our pencils and be really clear about what our priorities are.”
Mass Save has evolved significantly since it first launched in 2008, starting as an initiative mainly designed to conduct home energy assessments, distribute LED lightbulbs, and ensure homes and businesses are weatherized and well-insulated.
It was also fairly agnostic as to how buildings were heated and cooled: Reducing the amount of energy required to keep a home comfortable is good for both the individual customer’s wallet and everyone else because it lowers energy demand for the whole system.
But it’s morphed into a much larger program, which has made it a prime focus for elected officials eager to pull a quick lever to lower energy costs in a state that has among the highest in the country. Mass Save has become one of the few tools available to the state to drive decarbonization for a sector of the economy that accounts for 35 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Massachusetts.
In addition to weatherization efforts, the program now also aims to switch households from their oil or gas heating system to an electric heat pump — technology that is much more expensive than a traditional insulation job — and expand rebates and incentives toward renters, moderate-income customers, and customers living in designated equity communities — populations that have historically been left out even though they also pay into Mass Save.
“We will continue to advocate for a focus on lowering the energy bills of low- and moderate-income communities, improving delivery of services, and cutting administrative costs,” Lauren Diggin, a spokesperson for the Department of Energy Resources, said in a statement. “We are committed to ensuring a cost-effective program that efficiently delivers to customers.”
The debate inside the EEAC as it prepares Mass Save’s next three-year planessentially boils down to breadth versus depth.
The state could embark on a plan that places more emphasis on traditional weatherizations and insulations with some focus on heat pumps — a narrower effort that may reach more homes by eating up less of the program’s budget but deliver fewer emissions benefits. It could also aim to simply bring as many households into the program as possible without regard for income level or renter status.
Or, the state could more aggressively pursue costlier heat pump and solar panel installations and deepen targets baked into the current plan to reserve a set amount of benefits for lower- and middle- income customers. That would continue the effort to work toward greater equity within the program and potentially provide greater emissions benefits but likely reach fewer customers overall.
For the current program cycle, program administrators developed a list of 21 designated equity communities in cities like Brockton, Worcester, Springfield, and several Boston neighborhoods including Roxbury and Mattapan. Customers there have been offered no-cost weatherizations regardless of income. And they set out to install heat pumps in an additional 87,000 homes between 2025 and 2027 — more than what Mass Save had done cumulatively since 2019.
For Mass Save proponents, cutting support for energy efficiency — something entirely in the state’s control, unlike the barrage of actions taken by the Trump administration to cancel offshore wind projects — is the ultimate self-own.
Limiting the projected rise in energy demand reduces both the amount of electricity and infrastructure that utilities would need to purchase and pass on to customers. A 2026 analysis by environmental nonprofit Acadia Center found that $8.4 billion in ratepayer investments in Mass Save between 2016 and 2024 yielded $16 billion in savings. The report also found that a $1 billion cut to the program would cost customers $4.5 billion in lost benefits.
And on the hottest day of 2025, the program generated more than $2.6 million in savings in a single hour by lowering peak energy demand, according to the Department of Energy Resources.
An outright cut to the current program budget limited to 2027 alone as proposed by the House would save people some money upfront and wouldn’t directly bleed into the next Mass Save cycle, but there would still likely be spillover effects and trigger a scramble inside the EEAC to quickly scale back the program significantly.
Projects with household and business customers would need to be put on pause, jeopardizing their viability, and contractor jobs would be severely curtailed unless funding ramps back up. Customer trust that has been building — 81 percent of respondents view Mass Save as a trusted resource, up from 69 percent a year ago, according to a survey of 400 Massachusetts residents completed this past May — would likely decline.
Mass Save is “one of the best ways you can take control of the energy usage in your own home, in your own business, and have more control over your bills and your own financial situation,” said Kate Peters, Eversource’s director of residential energy efficiency.
A potential legislative compromise to keep the program’s current budget in place but cap or dial back future budgets could limit the upfront costs for ratepayers and provide a useful boundary for Mass Save administrators to understand the direction that Beacon Hill wants to take. But it also risks limiting energy savings down the line and how fast the state can cut emissions.
If there are cuts, the utilities and those overseeing the program on the EEAC would have at least a couple of months to digest any legislative reforms made to Mass Save before turning in a draft plan at the end of March — and even longer before they submit a plan to the DPU for review by the end of next October.
But either way, contingency plans are under discussion regarding what initiatives might need to be scaled back with less funding.
“Ultimately, it’s going to have to be decided: Who gets voted off the island?” said Larry Chretien, executive director of the Green Energy Consumers Alliance, who opposes the proposed Mass Save cut.
Others, though, are skeptical that the program, while laudable, is delivering the tangible benefits that justify the more than $1 billion it currently collects from ratepayers each year.
The majority of the advantages of Mass Save are no longer directly connected to financial benefits for ratepayers, argues the Massachusetts Coalition for Sustainable Energy (MCSE), which consists of business groups across the state. The DPU said as much itself in its approval in 2024 of the current plan, in which the regulators wrote that Mass Save benefits are now mostly derived from emissions reductions that “may not be evident to customers on their bills.”
Plus, the focus on more expensive heat pumps in the program only reduces emissions if electricity is generated by carbon-free sources. Roughly half of power in New England is still generated by natural gas, while electrification progress has proven “painfully slow,” leading to a program that features “ballooning costs” that are “resulting in very little direct cost savings to ratepayers,” according to letters that the MCSE sent to lawmakers over the summer.
That’s especially problematic if increased gas-to-heat pump conversions simply lower customers’ gas bills while their electric bills grow — a dynamic that means that “bill savings for program participants can no longer be assumed,” the DPU wrote, though special winter heat pump rates can make the technology more financially feasible.
“We’ve come to a point where we’ve gone too far,” said Bill Rennie, senior vice president at the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, a member of the MCSE. “Our members are all for renewables, green energy sources, and trying to continue on that path, but to get there, we need to be able to afford to still keep the lights on and keep the heat on. We need a reset.”
It’s true that Mass Save’s budget has grown substantially and, with it, both what customers pay into the program and the savings that they get out. It’s far and away the largest program of its kind among Northeast states; Mass Save was about $1.5 billion larger than New York’s energy efficiency program last year even though New York has more than double the population of Massachusetts.
The rate at which Mass Save has grown as a percentage of the typical utility bill, though, is still much less than the overall increase in energy costs in recent years.
As policymakers hash out how much is too much with respect to what burden ratepayers should bear in funding energy efficiency, there’s one macroeconomic shift that could meaningfully change the Mass Save calculus: The war in Iran that has sent oil prices surging.
Diesel is now an unprecedented $6.30 per gallon on average nationwide, according to AAA, with heating oil costing an average of $6.12 per gallon in Massachusetts.
About 1 in 5 households in the Bay State, mostly in the western part of the state, heat their homes with heating oil, one of the highest rates in the country. Heating oil prices are up 74 percent compared to last year, state data show.
The price spike could lead some lawmakers to feel even more bullish about the need to lower energy bills right away, including through a cut to Mass Save.
But others hope the geopolitical landscape further strengthens the case for Mass Save and to get off volatile fossil fuels.
Last winter, state officials forecasted that the cost to produce heat was relatively close between heating oil and heat pumps, with the assumption that oil would cost $3.10 per gallon — without the special heat pump rate factored in.
That modeling would likely look much different when heat pumps are compared to oil now at roughly double the cost.
“This is more essential than ever,” said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director at Acadia Center, an environmental nonprofit. “It just lays bare that this is the economic pain that we are vulnerable to by not making these investments.”
Courtesy of Commonwealth Beacon
