IN A SIGN of just how heated the debate around the state’s energy efficiency program has become, even a relatively small proposed reform that has been uniting Beacon Hill Democrats is generating increasingly intense pushback among some advocates and prompting larger questions about the goals of Mass Save altogether.
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Energy affordability legislation that the Senate passed earlier this month included language that largely mirrors a provision approved by the House, which would subject moderate-income customers in some of the state’s poorest communities to new income verification requirements in order to receive certain Mass Save benefits.
It’s a point of general agreement between the two chambers made even more notable by the otherwise sharp contrasts in their policy proposals to lower gas and electric bills for Bay Staters, which will now need to be reconciled in a conference committee.
Yet it’s prompting concerns that the people long left behind by Mass Save — whose benefits are designed to save ratepayers money — will now be subject to new rules just as those moderate-income customers have begun to participate in the program at historic levels.
“What we are seeing here is a system that is structurally unjust,” said Mary Wambui, a Lowell resident who represents residential customers on theenergy efficiency advisory council, which crafts the three-year Mass Save plans that are carried out through a collaboration among the state’s utilities. “Enough is enough. This new level of scrutiny is infuriating.”
Currently, higher income customers are able to access Mass Save benefits at a higher cost, while lower income residents can receive no-cost services like energy assessments, weatherizations, and heat pump installations and are verified through their participation in other public benefits programs. Moderate-income customers have recently also been able to receive no-cost weatherizations by self-attesting their income.
The change under consideration by the Legislation, however, would impose new verification requirements on moderate-income customers — but only on those who live in one of the state’s 21 “designated equity communities,” which are generally lower-income areas with a high share of residents who have not been previously served by Mass Save.
Wambui and some other advocates are slamming the plan to treat moderate-income residents in those areas with greater scrutiny.
The dispute hits at the heart of an even broader debate about whether Mass Save should be about equity — ensuring that customers, all of whom pay into the program through a charge on their utility bills, get access to benefits like energy assessments, weatherizations, and heat pumps across demographics, geographies, and income levels. Alternatively, Mass Save could simply try to perform as many weatherizations and install as many heat pumps as possible around the state to both reduce overall energy demand and reliance on fossil fuels, without regard for targeting harder-to-reach customers like renters and those living in poorer communities.
Any incremental move in either direction threatens to trigger backlash from the other side during a high-stakes battle to rein in energy costs amid an affordability crisis — a scenario now playing out over the effort to install new income verification requirements.
Moderate-income customers — defined as those earning between 61 and 80 percent of either the state median income or the area median income — have been able to self-attest their income status since 2024, when the advisory council and utilities agreed to institute the practice to provide no-cost home weatherizations. That was further codified when the Department of Public Utilities signed off on the current three-year plan, which started in 2025 and runs through next year, though there are still income verification requirements for those customers to access discounted heat pumps.
But the latest wrinkle from the Legislature, which would impact moderate income customers in places like Brockton, Worcester, Springfield, and certain Boston neighborhoods, would put an end to the self-attestation practice. Instead, those customers would need to have the owner of their rental property provide documentation proving that more than half of the renters of the property meet the moderate income eligibility requirements, while the same moderate-income customers in other communities could potentially continue to receive no-cost weatherizations through self-attestation under the current legislative language adopted by both chambers.
It’s not clear what the verification process would be for moderate-income customers in the designated equity communities who own their home.
“This is really trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist,” said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director at Acadia Center, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, who also serves on the energy efficiency advisory council. “At a time when self-attestation has finally got the moderate-income program really running well, in keeping with requests from the Legislature for years to help those individuals access benefits, this really seems counterintuitive to trying to achieve those results.”
The number of weatherizations performed through Mass Save for moderate-income customers has spiked since the switch to self-attestation, the energy efficiency advisory council show.
In 2022, about 300 weatherization projects for moderate-income customers were completed. In 2024, that number jumped to nearly 3,000 weatherization jobs performed for moderate income customers. In 2025, it to more than 8,000, after a separate benefit kicked in allowing all residential customers in designated equity communities to receive no-cost weatherizations regardless of income status.
Sen. Michael Barrett, a Democrat who chairs the Senate energy committee, defended the move as a financially prudent one to guard against the potential for fraud — even as he also opened the door to further changes.
“Once you get beyond poor households, whose eligibility tends to be already established through one pre-existing program or another, you need to verify incomes in order to target funds carefully,” he told CommonWealth Beacon.
But when asked about why there would be escalated income verification requirements only for moderate-income customers in the designated equity communities and not for those customers statewide, even though both groups can currently access no-cost weatherizations with income self-attestation, Barrett said he’d like to see that language changed so the same verification rules apply to all moderate-income customers.
Rep. Mark Cusack, Barrett’s counterpart as head of the House energy committee, stood by the proposal to introduce income verification requirements solely for the moderate income customers in the designated equity communities, rather than level the playing field for the requirements to apply to moderate income customers across the state, so that incentives “flow to households that actually qualify and need it most.”
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“Verifying income is not and should not be a point of contention,” Cusack said in a statement. “People should be able to prove they qualify for a program that is paid for by the ratepayers who do not.”
Mass Save program administrators did not respond to questions about how they feel about the potential new income verification requirements from the Legislature.
Either way, the endorsement of the new verification requirements on the part of the Democratic supermajority on Beacon Hill indicates heightened political sensitivities to integrity within Mass Save as the program faces blowback for its perceived bloat amid rising utility bills. Barrett, for instance, pointed to two past instances of fraud within Mass Save that can at least partially be attributed to self-attestation, though both instances stemmed from contractors, not customers receiving benefits through the program.
Mass Save’s current budget of $4.5 billion over the three-year term is up from $4 billion in the prior plan as the program expands its reach and shifts toward installing expensive heat pumps to reduce emissions from buildings, eating up an average of about $350 per residential customer in 2024, according to state data.
Mass Save used that money last year to weatherize 52,000 homes and install heat pumps in nearly 32,000 homes, resulting in the equivalent of removing 900,000 gasoline-powered passenger cars from the road and driving down total energy demand, according to its latest annual report.
As the program budget has grown and because the amount paid each month for Mass Save is based on energy usage, it can add insult to injury during heat waves or particularly cold stretches, when gas or electricity usage can spike for heating and cooling.
That’s why, for some, it’s appropriate to rethink what is being asked of ratepayers. Speaker Ron Mariano and his top lieutenants pushed a plan through the House to dramatically cut the program’s overall funding by $1 billion, viewing the move as one of the few direct levers Beacon Hill has in its control to lower energy bills in the short term even as Mass Save is credited with saving money in the long run.
The Senate rejected any cuts or caps to the Mass Save budget in its legislation, setting up the issue as one of the biggest to debate in the negotiation between the two chambers.
“At a time when residents here are struggling with higher costs elsewhere in their lives, it is time to reexamine Mass Save’s goals and refocus the program on its original objective – saving money for ratepayers,” said Robert Rio, who has served on the energy efficiency advisory council since 2008. “That means some overly generous rebates may need to be changed or eliminated entirely, but these changes — along with other reforms to lower costs — will result in a more effective and sustainable program that in the long run will deliver real savings to consumers.”
In practice, a change to the income verification process would only impact at most 15,000 customers between now and the end of next year. That’s how many more weatherizations Mass Save for moderate-income customers during that time period. If the Legislature moves forward with language that singles out those in the designated equity communities, even fewer customers would be immediately impacted by the new requirements.
Prior to 2024, the utilities did deploy an income verification system for moderate-income customers to receive benefits, and they various ways of streamlining that process for the better part of a decade, including a pilot program that used Census block income data.
Wambui, though, said she worries that the income verification requirements proposed now are a response to overblown fears of fraud and would only undermine long-standing inequities in Mass Save after years of work at the advisory council to bring forth self-attestation. A report last year from Auditor Diana DiZoglio found that as a community’s population density and the proportion of renters increase, benefits from Mass Save typically decrease.
Denser urban municipalities with more renters like many of the designated equity communities “were consistently found to contribute more to the program even when they ultimately do not get much back, if anything, from the program,” the report found.
And while Mass Save provides $2.76 in benefits for customers for every $1 invested, according to the program, that return drops in many municipalities with per capita incomes below the state median. In Lowell, Everett, Worcester, and Fall River, for example, residents are contributing more to Mass Save than the state average while reaping fewer program benefits, DiZoglio found.
Put in that light, Wambui said, the new requirements could reverse progress and deter already vulnerable populations from accessing Mass Save benefits and lowering their utility bills — the same people hit hardest by high energy costs, which in Massachusetts are double the national average.
The chorus of praise for the Senate’s energy bill among environmental groups is misguided, Wambui said, even though it fulfilled many of their wishes and departed sharply from the House version that would significantly slash Mass Save’s budget.
Climate groups “were happy that Mass Save has been preserved” in the Senate bill, she said, “and I believe they are getting it wrong because if these households do not get weatherized, if these households do not get an opportunity to switch fuels, it’s the poorest people” who will be dealing with higher costs.
As Healey pushes for the two chambers to send her energy affordability legislation by the end of the month, it’s becoming clear that some shakeup of Mass Save will occur as legislators engage in a tricky balancing act to plot the program’s future.
But whether it’s a small change to the makeup of the advisory council, reform to income verification requirements for customers, a wholesale rethink of the program budget itself, or some combination, there are complicated tradeoffs that lawmakers will need to hash out.
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