A key regulatory ruling by the Department of Public Utilities will determine whether we’re serious about aggressively transitioning to cleaner energy
WE’VE BEEN HERE before. Seventy years ago, every gas appliance in the Commonwealth was converted—house by house, street by street—to a cleaner, safer fuel. This transition was planned, coordinated, and universal.
Today, as gas becomes more and more expensive, the Department of Public Utilities faces a choice: proactively lead the next transition, as it did before, or let gas utilities trap customers in a failing system. Much of this hinges on the meaning of a key legal phrase invoked by utilities — “obligation to serve” — the idea that, as publicly regulated entities, they are required to provide service to all who want it. That phrase is now at the center of a high-stakes showdown over a 2024 climate law enacted by the Massachusetts Legislature.
We once had a different fuel running through pipes to Massachusetts homes – “manufactured gas,” which was made from pressurized steam pushed through crushed coal. It had a different chemistry, color, and energy intensity. The level of impurities varied, and occasionally people died from the carbon monoxide.
After World War II, a new type of gas became available, extracted through drilling into underground deposits. This “natural gas” had fewer dangerous impurities and delivered twice the energy for the same cost.
Transmission pipelines reached Boston in 1953. Utility workers went from street to street to perform the needed changes. Residents opened their doors willingly since they were told ahead of time that this would reduce their bills and improve safety. Once inside, the workers retrofitted every gas appliance: stoves, water heaters, and boilers.
Crews returned repeatedly until all the work was complete. That was how seriously the industry took its responsibility to serve the public. As John Bacon, the one-time president of Boston Gas, later recalled: “We had a couple of situations where we had to break in to get the appliances converted.”
State regulators approved having gas customers pay for these and other system-wide changes, since moving to a safer and more affordable system was in the public interest for all.
Fast forward to the present day, and it’s a very different picture. Gas use in Massachusetts homes has dropped 25 percent since 1990. This stems from the general trend of warmer winters, energy efficiency, and electric heat pumps – which have been outselling gas boilers for years, since they provide cooling along with heating.
This decline will probably accelerate, because heat-pump customers can now pay a lower electric rate, making their heating bills roughly the same as with gas.
Regulators see where this is headed. If the gas system stays the same size with the same fixed costs, with less gas sold over time, each unit of gas will cost more and more. Rising costs will encourage customers to defect faster, until the only ones left will be those who can’t install a new electric heating system: low-income homeowners and renters.
Regulators are requiring gas and electric utilities to plan how to rightsize the antiquated, declining gas system. Gas utilities are now allowed to convert whole streets to a geothermal network—like the one Eversource gas installed in Framingham as part of a pilot study—or to air-source heat pumps. Both methods are safer than gas, and provide cooling as well as heating, and cleaner air. With the new heat pump rate, customers on a geothermal network are likely to have much lower heating bills than with gas, these bills will have no price volatility (given that the energy is just beneath their feet, not tied to the global market like gas), and our energy dollars will stay in-state.
But gas utilities – potentially resistant to change – are not reacting by installing as many geothermal networks as possible. Instead, they’re saying they have an “obligation to serve” and that if even one customer wants gas on a mile-long street, the pipe must remain – forcing every other gas customer in that utility’s territory to subsidize that customer‘s choice.
However, the “obligation to serve” statute was amended in 2024. The change not only allows gas utilities to deny service to new customers, it allows gas utilities to discontinue service to an existing customer as long as the utility can ensure the customer has access to an alternative to heat their home, like electricity or geothermal energy. Although the amended law explicitly applies to “any person…in a town where a corporation is engaged in the…sale of gas or the distribution of energy,” gas utilities continue to insist that the law applies only to new customers.
The dispute over the obligation to serve will be resolved by the Department of Public Utilities, probably near the end of 2026. The question is whether the DPU will concede to utilities, allowing them, for the first time, to lock customers into an increasingly expensive, unhealthy, and climate-damaging fuel —betraying the very purpose for which regulated utilities were created.
Imagine a utility truck pulls up on your street in 2030. Technicians emerge, not to patch another gas leak, but to make final connections to the renewable thermal network. Down the street, a crew installs heat pumps, their work coordinated with the gas pipe decommissioning.
A neighbor watches from her porch. A year earlier, she worried about losing her gas stove. But the utility company handled everything, and her new induction range heats faster, the heat pump keeps the house comfortable year-round, her bills dropped, and her child has fewer asthma attacks. The transition became manageable because it was planned, coordinated, and universal.
This transition will happen. Gas use is declining, and that decline is about to accelerate. The only question is whether Massachusetts will manage it intelligently, as it has in the past, or will it let utilities trap customers in a system in decline.
Audrey Schulman co-founded and for 16 years helped run HEET, a thermal network innovation hub. She is now the executive director of the nonprofit climate solutions incubator Black Swan Lab.
