Winter in New England does not negotiate. It arrives on its own schedule, and before it arrives come the meters and the ledgers — the price of a gallon of oil, the size of a pensioner’s check, the small nightly arithmetic of who stays warm. That arithmetic has turned hostile. For the week of September 28, the average price of home heating oil in Massachusetts stood at $6.08 a gallon, according to Governor Maura Healey’s office, against $3.52 at the same time last year: a rise of more than 70 percent.
On Monday, the governor answered the arithmetic with a signature. From the State House on Beacon Hill, Healey declared an energy emergency and unrolled a bundle of relief measures her administration says could cut residents’ heating costs by tens of millions of dollars this winter. Taken together, her office said, the executive actions could deliver “nearly $150 million in relief for Massachusetts households.”
A new rung on the ladder
The help climbs higher up the income ladder than before. An additional $15 million goes to winter heating assistance for low-income residents, and beside it the administration is building something new — a middle-income heating oil benefit for households earning between 60 and 100 percent of the state median income. State officials plan to spend $34 million on the program, which Healey estimated would reach roughly 50,000 households, with eligible customers receiving up to $680 per household.
Ratepayers, meanwhile, will pay less into the Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard, a 17-year-old program that rewards Massachusetts businesses and others for installing eligible alternative-energy systems. Declaring an emergency also lets state agencies protect against price gouging and access additional funds.
The green till
The money for the warmth comes, in part, from an unlikely drawer: alternative compliance payments, the sums electricity suppliers and utilities owe the state when they fail to purchase a required share of renewable energy in a given year. Those payments ordinarily flow toward local and state clean energy projects. It is not the first time Healey has reached for them — her administration used the same funds to trim some customers’ electric bills earlier this year, and to hand customers a $50 credit on their electric bills in the spring of 2025.
I’m working every day to lower costs for people across Massachusetts, and energy is top of my list.
“Any time I see something that is going to save people money in this state, we’re going to take it,” she added at Monday’s news conference. She has repeatedly laid the rising costs at the door of the Trump administration’s war in Iran — a war whose windfall has flowed to whoever owns the barrels, with poorer drivers paying most — and she has preached an “all of the above” approach to sourcing the state’s energy as she seeks a second term.
The third of November
Healey herself is on the ballot on November 3, and many voters will be measuring whether she has done enough to pare back rising costs. She has pushed lawmakers to act on legislation dealing with energy costs, and last month she called for temporarily suspending the state’s gas tax — a nonstarter among many lawmakers, and a narrower version of an idea her Republican opponent, Michael Minogue, had already been pushing.
Ever since I filed [energy legislation], I’ve been strongly urging the Legislature to act. It’s also important, though, that I go forward and do the things that I can do as governor.
One question she did not take up: whether she would support proposed cuts to Mass Save — the state’s energy-efficiency program, which bolsters clean energy projects — that House lawmakers have backed. She did not address the repeated questions, the Boston Globe reported.
Minogue, for his part, pointed to his own menu in a statement: eliminating the gas tax “completely,” slashing what he calls “climate taxes” on utility bills, and scrapping the requirement that the state effectively zero out its emissions by 2050. Several of those pitches would need the approval of the Democrat-led Legislature.
While Maura Healey rushes from one last-minute press conference to another in the final 30 days of her term, Massachusetts families are still waiting for real relief.
There was also a hand extended from an older name in Massachusetts politics. The state is partnering with the Citizens Energy Corporation and its president, former Representative Joe Kennedy III, to create a “winter warmth fund” supporting both the existing low-income heating program and the new middle-income benefit; Citizens is committing $100,000 to start. Kennedy, a Democrat, praised Healey’s administration for trying to “do everything that they can to get out in front of” impending heating needs, and called on the private sector to invest in the effort. “For businesses in particular,” he said, “this is an opportunity to make a tangible contribution to the well-being of the communities where your employees, your customers, and your neighbors live.”
So the governor signs, the challenger scoffs, the old family writes a check. The price at the truck, when it comes, will be $6.08 a gallon regardless.