Lower Our Energy Bills and Invest in Clean Energy

More than half of your monthly bill isn't the electricity or gas you use to heat or cool your home, it goes to a black box of profit (or "delivery charges"). Your energy bills are high because utility giants like Eversource and National Grid have access to lawmakers behind closed doors. Erika was one of just a few legislators who fought to ensure we all know where our money is going when utilities try to raise our bills, and she was one of the few Democrats who voted against handing utilities a 30-year monopoly. For 12 years, polluters snuck $6.2 billion of gas infrastructure onto your bill because legislators were silent. Climate action and affordability are the same fight: the clean energy transition is how we lower bills for good.

Your Bill Is Their Business Model

Massachusetts families pay some of the highest energy costs in the entire country, with the third-highest electricity rates in the continental United States. And while you were deciding whether to turn the thermostat down another degree, Eversource was on an earnings call telling shareholders the good news: the company more than doubled its profits last year, from $811 million to $1.69 billion, while its CEO took home $15 million. That is not an accident, and it is not the weather. Investor-owned utilities are guaranteed a profit on the infrastructure they build, which means every pipe and every wire is a return for shareholders before it is a service to you, and it means the incentive at every single step between the power plant and your home is to spend more of your money, not less.

The clearest example is the pipeline replacement program that has quietly charged ratepayers $6.2 billion over the last decade for gas infrastructure, with a projected total cost exceeding $40 billion, all for pipes the Commonwealth plans to retire as we electrify. Working families are being billed for decades to come for a fossil fuel system we are leaving behind, and the utilities collecting the money have every incentive to keep laying pipe.

Erika's Record: Stopping the Blank Check

Erika led the transparency fight that made every committee vote public, and that victory met this moment. When the Legislature tried to advance a bill that gutted energy efficiency programs, weakened our climate commitments, and shifted costs onto ratepayers, the organizing that came before made it impossible: a few legislators pushed on the inside, climate justice organizations and constituents pushed on the outside, and together we made it politically impossible to move the bill.

Then Erika kept fighting on the floor. When the House energy bill proposed cutting $1 billion from energy efficiency programs that save families roughly three dollars for every dollar invested, she filed the amendment to save them. She filed the Constituents' Right to Know amendment so you can see exactly what is driving your bill. And she was one of the few Democrats who voted against handing utilities a 30-year monopoly, because no corporation should get a blank check written on your monthly bill.

Erika has also fought to make energy efficiency work for the people who need it most. The State Auditor found that residents of Gateway Cities paid 24 percent more per capita into energy efficiency programs than the state average outside those cities, while many higher-income communities got back more than they put in, and Erika will keep fighting until no-cost upgrades reach every renter, every working family, and every environmental justice community, because the families paying the most into these programs deserve their fair share of the savings.

The Energy We Deserve Is the Energy We Own

It is easy to say what Beacon Hill is not doing. The real question is what we are going to build with the political power we have built, and Erika's answer is public power. Forty-one Massachusetts communities already get their electricity from municipal light plants, publicly owned utilities with no shareholders to pay, and the results speak for themselves: in Hudson, the public utility charges residential rates dramatically lower than the investor-owned utilities charge next door. New York is proving the model at scale, where the Build Public Renewables Act has the state's public power authority advancing a plan of 45 renewable projects and nearly 5.5 gigawatts of clean energy, all of it required to be built with union labor through prevailing wage and project labor agreements.

Public ownership means full accountability: no incentive to extract profit at generation, at transmission, or at distribution before the power ever reaches your home. Erika will fight for publicly owned renewable energy generation in Massachusetts, and for the resilient, low-cost, clean energy investments our communities deserve.

Data Centers Must Not Become the Next Blank Check

The AI boom is arriving in our neighborhoods as data centers, massive facilities that consume enormous amounts of energy and water, and the pattern is repeating: tax breaks snuck into bills while communities that have waited decades for clean air are asked to wait again, and massive new energy demand that utilities will happily build for, with the costs landing on your bill. Erika filed legislation to protect working class communities and communities of color from the environmental impact of data center expansion, and she will fight to make sure Big Tech's boom is not financed by your household.

The Unfinished Agenda

In the Senate, Erika will keep working with the climate justice coalition she has fought alongside for years, including 350 Mass, the Sierra Club, Clean Water Action, and the unions building the clean energy transition. And she will fight to:

• Build 100 percent renewable energy with union labor. Offshore wind, solar, and a modern grid, built with prevailing wage, project labor agreements, and apprenticeship pipelines, so the clean energy transition creates careers, not just megawatts.
• Make every home affordable to heat and cool. Fully fund energy efficiency programs, expand no-cost upgrades for renters and working families, and invest in whole-home repairs so that older housing can actually take advantage of them, prioritizing the environmental justice communities that have paid in the most and gotten back the least.
• Stop new gas infrastructure. Wind down the pipeline replacement blank check and stop charging ratepayers for decades of fossil fuel infrastructure the Commonwealth plans to retire, redirecting that investment to electrification and networked geothermal.
• Make utilities show their work and pay their own way. Real disclosure of what drives your bill, and an end to utilities charging their lobbying, advertising, and trade association dues to ratepayers.
• Make data centers pay their own way. No tax breaks without accountability: data centers must cover their own infrastructure costs, run on renewable energy, and be sited to protect, not pollute, environmental justice communities.
• Build public power. Support and expand municipal light plants and fight for publicly owned renewable generation, so that clean energy belongs to the people who use it.