By Eva Morgan
On October 1st, Governor Healey sent a letter to the Trump administration requesting that the federal government move quickly in its review and permitting of R.A.R.E., a gas pipeline expansion project running through CT, RI, and MA. The first line of the letter refers to a “mutual desire to get more U.S. natural gas into New England to reduce reliance on higher-cost imported fuel and lower costs for customers.” Our governor, who once promised she would be our “point guard on climate”, is now requesting more polluting and expensive fossil fuel energy and aligning with an administration whose energy policy she has heavily criticized.
What is R.A.R.E.?
R.A.R.E stands for Reliable, Affordable, Resilient Enhancement and is being proposed by the transmission line’s owner, Algonquin Gas Transmission, AGT, and its parent company, Enbridge, a multinational Canadian energy company famous for major gas leaks, oil spills, and a vast history of overall environmental harm and degradation.
The R.A.R.E expansion project will expand 8 miles of existing pipeline in Mendon, Bellingham, Franklin, and Wrentham in Massachusetts, resulting in an over five times capacity increase. It also includes an expansion on the same transmission line in Rhode Island, and modifications at a compressor station in Connecticut. Overall this project will cost $300 million, a price that will be passed through to gas customers through supply costs, and bring 75 million cubic feet per day more fracked gas into the region, increasing local air pollution and emissions. While Healey seems to believe claims of affordability and reliability, the numbers suggest that fracked gas infrastructure expansion is anything but.
The false promise of fracked gas
Historically, increasing pipeline capacity does not reduce bills. Despite a 51% pipeline capacity increase in the past decade, household gas prices have skyrocketed from production constraints, global trade events, and corporate profiteering. As a region, we are already overly reliant on fracked gas for heating and electricity, a reliance that costs us during extreme weather events and supply constraints, both through prices and outages. 52% of Massachusetts homes heat with fracked-gas delivered by utilities like Eversource and National Grid, and 65% of our in-state electricity is generated through fracked gas combustion in power plants. During cold snaps, when we need the energy the most to heat our homes and buildings, production in the shale (we get most of our gas from the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania) can be impacted by freeze-offs. Cold weather can also cause fracked-gas pipeline equipment and power plants to stall from freezing equipment, leading to power outages.
As heat domes and cold snaps become common, we need the real reliability and affordability that comes from renewable energy and energy storage both for home heating and electricity generation. It has become abundantly clear that we can’t afford to pay for or rely on more fracked gas.
More gas = higher costs?
Eversource, a gas and electricity utility, has purchased 40% of the increased fracked gas capacity that will come from R.A.R.E. (contracts approved by Healey’s DPU last year), adding to the promise that more gas won’t decrease costs. The reason for this, put simply, is that we pay more for the gas infrastructure than we do for the gas.
Utility gas bills are split up between supply charges and delivery charges. The supply charges are a pass through for what the utility pays for the gas, in this case it’s what Eversource is paying AGT. AGT passes the pipeline construction costs along in the price of gas to Eversource, and Eversource passes that along to the consumers. Increasing gas capacity through R.A.R.E. is unlikely to decrease the charges that make up the majority of our heating bills, the delivery charges, which is what utilities like Eversource charge us for building and maintaining the local gas infrastructure. These delivery charges will continue to increase, regardless of gas supply, as it’s how for-profit utilities make their money. Increasing gas supply without changing the profiteering utility business model, won’t decrease our bills. (Joe Nolan, CEO of Eversource who made $15 million last year, recently claimed that he has good relations with the Governor, so the hope of drastic utility reform from Healey is limited.)
More expansions in MA
R.A.R.E. was not the only pipeline expansion project supported by Healey in this letter to Secretary Wright, Trump’s Secretary of Energy. She also mentioned Project Beacon, an expansion project on the same AGT line, that is rumored to be over 4x bigger than R.A.R.E., across NY, CT, RI, and MA. Project Beacon has not yet entered the state or federal permitting process, but they claimed to receive a larger than expected response to their “open season”, when companies weigh the interest for new gas capacity. Enbridge is claiming that utilities, power generators, and data centers are looking to buy in to this future expansion. Healey also welcomed “more opportunities ahead.”
Another expansion, a 2x increase in gas capacity running underneath the cape cod canal, is currently under review both federally and state-wide, and we are now fighting at the regional approval level (if you live on Cape Cod, please check out our comment guide and consider submitting a comment).
As we near our 2050 net-zero mandate in Massachusetts, we need our Governor to focus on real solutions, like renewable energy and utility accountability, and not buy into the false fossil fuel narrative that companies like Enbridge are leaning so heavily on.
Take action by calling on her to reject the false narrative that more fracked gas will lower our bills when we know that renewable energy is the cheapest and most reliable source we have, and that our bills are being driven up by utility greed and corporate profits.
📞 Please call her office at (617) 725-4005 and send an email to her office, and let her know that we can’t afford more gas in our state.