If you opened your utility bill this summer and felt your stomach drop, you are not alone. Families across Massachusetts are paying some of the highest energy costs in the entire country. And while you were deciding whether or not you could afford to run the air conditioning through another heat wave, Eversource was on an earnings call telling shareholders their “good news”: they more than doubled their profits last year, from $811 million to $1.69 billion, and their CEO took home $15 million.

That is the system working exactly as designed.

Here is how utilities make money in Massachusetts: they do not profit from the energy itself, they profit from what they build (with a guaranteed rate of return!). This means the more they spend on infrastructure, the more they make, and every dollar of that guaranteed profit comes out of your monthly energy bill. That's why more than half of your bill is not for the electricity or gas you use. It's unitemized and unexplained “delivery charges”, a black box of infrastructure costs that the utilities profit from and you fund.

The State House writes the law that determines how much utilities can charge and how they earn profits. The State House created the black box, and it has the power to open it. So when Eversource brags to Wall Street about boosting profits, they are counting on Beacon Hill to keep the status quo intact and write the rules to benefit them, not us.

Earlier this session, in the fall, the legislature came close to passing an energy bill that would have handed the utilities exactly what they wanted: to gut energy efficiency programs, weaken climate commitments, and shift costs onto ratepayers, all negotiated behind closed doors.

But we stopped it!

And it was thanks to the organizing around transparency that made this possible. When powerful people on Beacon Hill insisted that committee votes should be taken behind closed doors, I didn't just quietly accept that things had to be this way. I spent years leading the fight for transparency at the State House, and together we won a change in rules that made every committee vote publicly available. That transparency win is what made this fight against giant utilities winnable. Because now, legislators know their votes on the energy bill would be publicly known. With a few legislators pushing on the inside, and climate justice groups and constituents like you putting pressure on the outside, we made it politically impossible for legislators to take a vote to advance the bill out of committee. Legislators who previously would have voted yes in the dark were not prepared to defend it in the daylight.

And because we blocked this terrible version of the bill, the latest version of the bill now includes provisions that will lower costs and closely monitor them going forward, and it protects the programs that are making investments towards a resilient future: weatherization that cuts bills for working families, energy efficiency upgrades that reduce demand, and the clean energy transition that is our only long-term path to affordable energy. That is what the inside-outside strategy delivers: not just stopping a bad bill, but putting forth a better one.

It is easy to say what Beacon Hill is not doing. But the real question is what we are going to build with the political power we have built together? Where we go from here is publicly owned renewable energy.

Right now, there is a profit margin baked in at every single point between where energy is generated and your wall outlet: profit on generation, and profit on transmission, and profit on distribution. Each layer has shareholders demanding returns, executives demanding bonuses, and rate cases demanding increases, and every layer of profit lands on your monthly bill. Public ownership removes that incentive entirely, because when we own the energy system, there is no one skimming at each step, and there is full accountability: the people setting rates answer to you, not to an earnings call. And this is already working today, in New York and in dozens of communities right here in Massachusetts.

In New York, organizers won the Build Public Renewables Act in 2023, which requires the New York Power Authority, the largest publicly owned power provider in the country, to build renewable energy directly whenever private developers fall short of the state's climate targets. NYPA's first plan includes 37 projects totaling more than three gigawatts of clean energy, powering the equivalent of 2 million households, built with prevailing wages and project labor agreements, with bill credits flowing to low- and moderate-income households and $25 million a year invested in renewable energy job training. Public power, union jobs, and lower bills for the families who need it most: that is what it looks like when the state takes the lead rather than leaving it to for-profit corporations.

And in Massachusetts, we have had proof of concept for over a century: forty-one communities in our state run their own municipal light plants, serving all or part of fifty cities and towns. In Hudson, the community-owned utility has kept the lights on for more than a hundred years, and in 2024 their average monthly bill was about 64 percent less expensive than what the investor-owned utilities charged residents in nearby communities, month after month, year after year. Belmont owns its own light department, and so does Concord: these are our neighbors, and they are paying less for more reliable service because nobody is extracting profit from their electricity.

Public power works, and the question is why most of Massachusetts is still paying a private toll on a public necessity.

I'm running for State Senate because we must continue building on the political power we built together: the power that stopped the legislature from handing giant utilities a blank check behind closed doors, the power that stopped them from giving away more of your monthly bill to shareholder profit while gutting our climate commitments.

The real choice in this race is between tweaking around the edges and taking on the structural fights: taking on Eversource and National Grid so they can't treat our monthly bills like a blank check for their shareholders, and building the public power that makes their business model obsolete. I'm the kind of Democrat who pushes our own party to do the right thing the first time, not after it's already safe.

We proved what happens when transparency and organizing come together: when committee votes are public, when a few legislators push on the inside and our communities push on the outside, the old way of doing business stops working. Now we take the next step, from stopping what is wrong to building what is right: publicly owned renewable generation, real oversight of utility profits, and a grid that answers to the people who pay for it.

We are going to build on the power we built together to win the resilient, low cost, and clean energy investments our communities deserve.

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Paid for by Committee to Elect Erika Uyterhoeven · Somerville, MA
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