Massachusetts State House passes “comprehensive” energy affordability bill
The Massachusetts State House of Representatives has voted 128-27 in favor of Bill H.5151, a piece of legislation designed to address rising utility costs across the state.
Also known as “An Act Relative to Energy Affordability, Clean Power, and Economic Competitiveness,” the newly-passed bill has a total of 40 cosponsors throughout the House. Passed Feb. 26, the bill was given an emergency preamble to help speed it along through the process and outlines a path forward for the state’s energy crisis, including solar and storage solutions.
Massachusetts currently deploys the second most distributed renewable power solutions in the U.S, trailing only Hawaii in that regard. At Intersolar 2026, Michael Judge, undersecretary of energy for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said his state has so much distributed power, that it’s actually “breaking the grid.”
Still, the state is focused on cutting red tape in the wake of changes to the Inflation Reduction Act.
“We’re going through these complex integrated planning processes where we’re trying to modernize the grid, upgrade it, so that we can interconnect this next wave of distributed generation that will be built,” Judge says during the Intersolar 2026 Wednesday keynote.
Now, the state of Massachusetts will have even further opportunities to build solar and storage solutions, thanks to a clause in the bill detailing a statewide solar permitting platform focusing heavily on the residential sector.
“The department shall establish and administer a state smart solar permitting platform for the purpose of expediting plan review of applications submitted to municipalities to construct and issue permits for residential solar energy systems and associated equipment,” the bill says, allowing solar firms to move into project construction much quicker than before.
Energy and climate institutions react
Kyle Murray, director of state program implementation and Massachusetts program for New England-based climate nonprofit the Acadia Center, says the bill is a promising advancement for the state. Still, there is more work to be done.
“Energy affordability and clean energy are not at odds – fundamentally, the same solutions needed to address underlying drivers of energy costs are those that will make the grid cleaner, more flexible, and more efficient,” Murray says. “The House has advanced a promising updated package of policy reforms that better recognizes this reality, but more work must be done to rectify the major remaining red-flag and remove arbitrary and counterproductive cuts to energy efficiency, which should remain the anchor of the Commonwealth’s energy affordability strategy.
“Failing to do so will make this package a net-loser for families, who will be left paying dearly for more expensive conventional fuel and infrastructure.”
The bill’s passing was also very pleasing for officials on the nationwide level to see. Ruthie DeWit, northeast state affairs director for the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), says the bill contains “commonsense reforms” for the Bay State’s straining energy grid.
“The solar and storage industry applauds the Massachusetts House for advancing energy affordability legislation that accelerates deployment across the Commonwealth,” DeWit says. “Solar and storage are the fastest and most affordable way to add new capacity to the grid and a critical tool for lowering prices for families. This bill removes barriers to development and reduces costs by creating a surplus interconnection service to unlock unused grid capacity and by establishing a statewide solar permitting platform that can cut average residential installation costs by $7,000.”
