New England’s Energy Crisis:
Almost every New England state is on track to water down or miss their ambitious climate goals set to be hit by 2030. States across the Northeast have been beset by high energy costs and sluggish progress towards their climate goals. State governments have also been reluctant to impose real measures on state agencies, businesses and residents to meet the goals.
Massachusetts has done little to incentivize residents to use less energy and adopt more climate-friendly alternatives to energy-intensive vehicles and natural gas appliances. In addition, New England as a whole has not seen the levels of investment into clean, energy-independent infrastructure that it would have needed to meet its collective climate goals.
Many Northeast states sought to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, with many seeking to become net-zero by 2050. These goals were ambitious from the beginning, but have become more and more unattainable as time has gone on.
Massachusetts has also accomplished next to nothing in terms of curbing carbon emissions from transportation, the state’s single largest category of emissions. Transportation accounts for 38.1% of carbon emissions in Massachusetts.
According to the State’s climate report card for 2025. Roughly 166,000 electric vehicles of the 200,000 goal for the year were registered in the commonwealth by the end of the year.
The state has seen an increase in vehicle miles traveled from 53.3 million miles in 2022 to a projected 57.9 million miles traveled in 2025. According to Department of Revenue data viewed by StreetBlogsMass, drivers in Massachusetts purchased 2.53 billion gallons of gasoline in 2025.
MassDOT filings have shown that the agency will not comply with the state’s climate laws in constructing the new Cape Cod bridges. MassDOT only expects greenhouse gas emissions around the Cape Cod bridges to drop 17% by 2050, to 405,729 tons.
According to StreetBlogsMass, the reductions in emissions will come almost entirely from new EV purchases.
MassDOT’s “Beyond Mobility” plan, the agency’s long-term investment plan, does not make any mention of reducing motor vehicle traffic, according to StreetBlogsMass. The plan has many action items, including addressing road safety, but the plan does not lay out any specific goals towards doing so.
However, the state’s incentives for heat pump installations have been effective. The incentives have led to 133,753 homes installing heat pumps between 2020 and 2025. The goal set by the states was for 100,000 homes to have installed heat pumps in that timeframe.
This success has a caveat, though, according to the same report card, since 2010, natural gas usage for home heating has increased from 49% to 52% of homes. The share of homes using electricity for heat also increased from just 13.6% in 2010 to 20.5% in 2024.
Additionally, the heat pump incentives have not extended to many landlords. This lack of incentives has left tenants with ever-increasing heating and energy bills due to New England’s over-reliance on natural gas for electricity production, and oil for heating.
According to ISO-NE, the group responsible for operating New England’s power grid, 55% of power generated in New England in 2025 was produced by expensive natural gas power plants. By contrast, only 13% of the power generated came from renewable sources.
On top of that, New England is the single largest market for home heating oil in the United States. 82% of the 4.79 million homes that use oil for heat in the U.S. are located in New England, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency.
According to the state’s report card, 51.6% of energy demand is met by renewable energy. This total is met mainly through what are known as Renewable Energy Credits. Massachusetts has no control over where energy produced in Massachusetts is actually used, or where the energy used in Massachusetts comes from.
According to the City of Boston, “RECs create a system of energy accounting. They track who generates renewable electricity and which customers can claim a right to that electricity. RECs solve a fundamental challenge with the power grid. The challenge is that when energy generators feed their electricity into the grid, all the electricity mixes together. It’s impossible to know whether the electricity you receive was originally generated by a dirty or clean energy source.”
RECs do not reduce localized emissions emanating from natural gas and oil-fired power plants around New England.
The Kendall Cogeneration Station is a natural gas-fired power and steam plant in downtown Cambridge. This type of plant only comes online to meet spikes in demand, known as a peaking power plant. They often have smaller, less efficient equipment that leads to higher levels of localized emissions.
Electricity, much like gasoline, is an interconnected market across the entire region. Even as Massachusetts invests more into the proven technology behind energy independent infrastructure like solar and wind, costs will continue to rise for ratepayers until these newer, more cost-effective energy sources begin to displace carbon-intensive sources of energy. The state’s report points out this fact.
“The renewable generation located in-state is only a partial indicator of the state’s progress towards meeting electricity-related GHG emissions goals,” the report said.
Massachusetts only has 4,384 MW of daily renewable energy production capacity in the state, according to the state report.
“In-state electric capacity may be used to serve electricity demand both within Massachusetts and in other states across Independent System Operator (ISO) New England territory,” the climate report card said.
Massachusetts alone used more than 137,000 MW of electricity each day in 2023.
Natural gas has been lauded as a “Bridge Fuel” by oil industry professionals. According to the United Nations Energy Programme, it has been sold as a cleaner-burning fuel than coal, but something that could be replaced by other sources of energy in the future, once energy-independent infrastructure is built out.
“Recent scientific measurement campaigns, some of them supported by UNEP, have shown that methane emissions from oil and gas operations are much higher than was estimated earlier,” said Mark Radka, Head of UNEP Energy and Climate.
According to The New York Times, this has left governors and legislators across New England seeking cheap, short-term alternatives like expanded natural gas pipelines.
The governors of Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts have all expressed they would be open to the expansion of natural gas pipelines in their states, according to the New York Times.
“I think, generally speaking, if it’s affordable, New England governors are now willing to consider it,” Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont told The New York Times.
