The timing for this poll is good — for those at the State House looking to pare back some of the state’s energy efficiency spending. The poll, funded by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, should provide some air cover for those legislative leaders amid fierce pushback by environmental groups that want to protect these programs.
Governor Maura Healey has already taken steps to quell the rising anger.
Last spring, the Healey administration sliced $500 million from a three-year, $5 billion budget for the Mass Save energy efficiency program, one of the most generous in the country. And in January, Healey promised $180 million in refunds from penalties collected from utilities and other electricity suppliers when they fall short of the state’s renewable energy purchasing goals. These alternative compliance payments, as they’re known, otherwise get distributed for decarbonization projects across the state, from retrofitting town buildings to putting up solar panels.
Healey also filed a wide-ranging omnibus energy bill last year, with more long-term goals in mind. She said it would save ratepayers billions over time — let’s be honest, they’re mostly theoretical projections, not guaranteed — in part by supporting more battery storage and strengthening the existing electric grid. The governor doubled down on Monday with an executive order that sets aggressive solar and storage goals for the state, providing even more theoretical savings. As she gears up for a reelection fight, Healey repeatedly emphasizes affordability over climate concerns in her public pronouncements.
The Massachusetts House of Representatives approved its own version of Healey’s energy bill late last month, around the time the chambers’ survey results came out. Many of the policies in Healey’s bill — more long-term contracts for renewable power, for example, and provisions to spur nuclear and geothermal energy — were left intact. The House bill lops off another $1 billion from the Mass Save program, roughly halfway through its three-year budget, reducing it to $3.5 billion, and also required the bulk of alternative compliance payments to be refunded, estimated at $388 million over 10 years.
House Speaker Ron Mariano wisely played down the bill’s short-term impact, when asked by WCVB’s Sharman Sacchetti how much relief ratepayers would see next winter: It’s not going to help much at all. Those saved dollars, spread across the entire state, don’t amount to much per household.
But for business leaders like Greater Boston Chamber chief executive Jim Rooney, it’s a start. He’s noticed energy costs rise up the lists of his business members’ concerns in the past two years, in particular. (Massachusetts had the fifth-highest electricity prices of any state in 2025, just behind Connecticut and Rhode Island, per the US Energy Information Administration.)
Rooney added energy costs to his list of concerns in January, for his 2026 address to chamber members. And he commissioned Suffolk pollster David Paleologos to gauge how consumers — not businesses — weigh it among their cost concerns.
Quite high, it turns out. Respondents singled it out as their most concerning household expense, followed by health care, groceries, and then housing.
Rooney said he expected a high number, but was shocked to find Massachusetts residents ranked utility bills as their biggest concern. Maybe too much attention has been paid to pro-climate policies in the past, he says, and not enough to the underlying costs to businesses and consumers.
The knock on energy costs in New England is that we’re at the end of the major fuel pipelines. That’s true to some extent. But state climate policies also play a role, even as many of these policies should help improve our energy independence in the long run.
That’s one of the points that environmentalists like Caitlin Peale Sloan, vice president at Conservation Law Foundation, try to make in pushing back against these short-term cuts to decarbonization and efficiency programs. The cheapest fuel, the saying goes, is fuel that doesn’t get used. Meanwhile, she argues the cutbacks in the House bill will amount to fractions on consumers’ bills that they might not even notice. Spread out over the entire state, she says, and they equal “dozens of dollars” each month for most household.
Energy bills, because they can vary from month to month, often have an outsized psychological effect, she added. She sees them as an indicator of how people are simply feeling more financially squeezed than ever, on multiple fronts.
Now, the energy legislation moves on to the Senate, where energy committee co-chair Michael Barrett is seen as a champion on climate issues. Barrett has led the committee for nine years, and has shepherded through three major energy omnibus bills in that time.
He has expressed concerns over the years about the need to strike a balance, to avoid making pro-climate policies so expensive that they become politically unpalatable.
Those concerns have proven prescient. As the chamber polling shows, if people weren’t paying attention to their monthly electric and heating bills before, they’re certainly doing so now.
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.
