For Immediate Release: Statement on Pennsylvania’s RGGI Withdrawal
MEDIA CONTACTS
Paola Moncada Tamayo
Senior Policy and Data Analyst
ptamayo@acadiacenter.org; 860-246-7121 x204
Departure from Longstanding, Bipartisan Multistate Program Will Force the State to Miss Out on Nearly $20 Billion in Revenue Over Next 12 Years
Harrisburg, PA (November 14, 2025) — Earlier this week, Governor Josh Shapiro and state legislative leaders announced a budget deal agreement and associated bill (HB416) that will legislatively end Pennsylvania’s participation in a longstanding, 10-bipartisan multi-state program driving affordable energy, energy savings, job creation, and public health. This abandonment of Pennsylvania’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) will cost the Commonwealth a projected $20 billion in foregone revenue over the coming twelve years, removing the state’s most promising, cost-effective policy lever to reduce harmful emissions from the power section – and leaving Pennsylvania without any meaningful climate and energy affordability policy.
“Instead of allowing the state Supreme Court to rule on RGGI’s legality, Pennsylvania’s elected officials have chosen to abandon the program outright at a time when the program’s benefits are most urgently needed by families and communities,” said Paola Moncado Tamayo, Senior Policy and Data Analyst at Acadia Center. “This is a grave setback for Pennsylvania’s energy, climate, and affordability policies, and it leaves literal billions of dollars in revenues on the table that could have been invested to improve household affordability, reduce energy consumption, improve public-health in polluted communities, and insulate everyday families from rising energy costs driven by data center development in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the PJM region.”
“The value of the RGGI program for both consumers and the environment has been proven year after year – yielding more than twice as many energy bill savings ($20.2b) versus program revenues ($9.7b) to-date – which has helped the ten-state, bipartisan program withstand the test of time and political tumult since its inception in 2008,” said Jamie Dickerson, Senior Director, Climate and Clean Energy Programs, at Acadia Center. “On the heels of striking recent electoral victories for clean energy-led affordability in other states around the country, including in current RGGI states, Pennsylvania’s leaders have chosen precisely the wrong path and, in so doing, will force PA families and communities to miss out on billions in revenue that could have driven improved affordability, energy efficiency, job creation, public health, and much needed support for the working class.”
Many Billions in Lost Revenue and Benefits
Pennsylvania’s withdrawal carries enormous financial consequences. Based on PA DEP data and RGGI allowance price trajectories, the state has already missed out on more than $5 billion in potential allowance revenue since their projected start in the program in 2022. Other RGGI states have been investing their funds toward reducing energy bills for households, financing energy efficiency upgrades, modernizing the grid, and cutting harmful pollution. The analysis below shows the long-term losses are even more striking. Depending on future allowance prices, Pennsylvania’s departure will effectively forfeit over $20 billion in RGGI proceeds between now and 2037.
These billions of dollars translate into tangible impacts for people across the state:
Public Health: RGGI helps reduce carbon pollution and co-pollutants from power plants, which would mitigate the harmful health impacts of air pollution in Pennsylvania’s communities. RGGI stood to protect the well-being of Pennsylvania’s residents from the devastating health consequences of poor air quality and save hundreds of Pennsylvanian lives. According to Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), they projected that from 2020 to 2030 RGGI would prevent 639 premature deaths from respiratory illnesses, reduce hospital visits by 30,000 and deliver over $6 billion in public health benefits this decade.
Economic Prosperity: By joining RGGI, Pennsylvania was poised to reap substantial economic benefits, including program payments totaling approximately $1-2 billion annually, which could be directly invested in projects that benefit Pennsylvanians. This funding would promote job creation, stimulate the state’s economy, and benefit both public health broadly and acute impacts within environmental justice communities. Additionally, the public health improvements from reductions in criteria air pollution as a result of RGGI participation would result in 83,000 avoided lost workdays, according to the analysis by PA DEP.
Clean Air: Remaining a part of RGGI would bolster Pennsylvania’s commitment to environmental sustainability. It enables the state to reduce its carbon emissions, limit climate impacts, and protect the environment for future generations. According to DEP, RGGI could help Pennsylvania avoid between 97 and 225 million tons of carbon pollution by 2030.
A Short-Term Political Decision with Long-Term Costs and Consequences
Legal experts in Pennsylvania characterize the decision as a political concession, rather than a policy-based decision. The withdrawal was part of a broader budget negotiation that also included items like a $50 million cut to the Department of Conservation and Natural Resource, and a budget that is already being partially backfilled with oil and gas revenue. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had a sound legal basis to overturn the Commonwealth Court’s ruling, but Governor Shapiro and legislative leaders decided to let Pennsylvania walk away from the expected proceeds, from the pollution reductions, and from years of hard work put in by stakeholders through the RGGI Working Group. It is especially disappointing for this outcome to occur so late in process and so close to the successful initiation of Pennsylvania’s presence in the program. What’s more, the move comes on the heels of a statewide Democratic sweep in local elections, signaling strong public support for environmental protection and clean-energy progress. Despite this, Pennsylvania is now the only state in the broader Northeast region without a carbon-reduction program or a plan to create one.
No Clear Path Forward for a State-Only Carbon Market
The Shapiro Administration has repeatedly mentioned PACER, a Pennsylvania-specific cap-and-trade program, as a potential alternative. However, no viable legislation or executive action is moving forward, and major energy-market reform packages in the legislature have stalled. Even if PACER were to materialize further, any carbon market will perform substantially better when it’s part of a larger, multi-state system, one major reason why a standalone Pennsylvania program was always a fallback idea. With RGGI repealed and no viable replacement, the state is now moving backward and must start over seemingly from scratch. As a result, no other viable policy options currently exist in Pennsylvania to meaningfully address the impact of climate and energy affordability in the state, certainly not to the same degree as RGGI. Although it may be theoretically possible to develop a Pennsylvania-only program in the future, it is simply far less practical: RGGI is an existing, well-functioning program with all the structures in place to begin addressing power sector emissions immediately, and the powerful benefits of the program are evident across every one of its member states.
Implications for the Region
Finally, Pennsylvania’s withdrawal also carries consequences beyond its state borders. As the largest electricity producer in the Northeast and a major exporter of power, PA’s non-involvement weakens the region’s collective ability to combat climate change and tackle rising energy costs in a coordinated manner. Without the state’s participation, more carbon emissions can flow into neighboring RGGI states, forcing them to work harder and spend more to achieve the same regional results. If both Pennsylvania and Virginia had participated in RGGI auctions in 2022, Pennsylvania alone would have represented 44% of total regional power sector emissions covered under the RGGI program. RGGI works best when its members work together, and Pennsylvania stepping back makes the region’s path to a cleaner, more affordable electric system slower and less certain.
Massachusetts bill would undo climate goals and cut efficiency spending
Massachusetts lawmakers have advanced an energy-affordability bill that opponents say would undo years of work on policies to fight climate change and promote energy efficiency, all without actually saving consumers much money.
“The best you could say is that it is going after short-term affordability at the expense of long-term affordability,” said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director for climate-action nonprofit Acadia Center. “Unfortunately, because it misunderstands the actual drivers of cost, it will drive up costs for ratepayers.”
Advocates also question the logic behind the plan to make the state’s 2030 climate goals nonbinding. Cusack argues the move is necessary to prevent lawsuits against the state, should it not meet its targets, especially in the light of obstacles being thrown up by the Trump administration. Murray, however, finds this contention unconvincing: The likelihood of a successful lawsuit is too low to justify unravelling years of climate progress, he said.
To read the full article from Canary Media, click here.
Top Mass. House Members Seeking Major Rollback of Climate Laws
Top Massachusetts House members are pushing an expansive energy bill that would scale back several major climate initiatives and programs and give the state immunity from legal challenges that result from missing its 2030 climate targets.
While the bill appears to have almost no chance of passing in the Senate, the legislation marks a significant change in the House’s approach to climate and energy policy. The bill has drawn immediate outcry from climate and consumer advocates. And it sets the stage for a high-profile clash between environmental advocates and industry groups that historically have opposed climate policy.
Kyle Murray, the Acadia Center’s Massachusetts program director, said the bill fails to “meaningfully address many of the largest real underlying energy cost drivers,” including gas volatility, spending on gas distribution pipe replacements, electric transmission costs and utility profits.
To read the full article from RTO Insider, click here.
Proposed bill takes aim at the state’s climate goals and Mass Save
For decades, Massachusetts has passed increasingly proactive laws aimed at addressing the climate crisis and driving the clean energy transition, making the state a leader in tackling greenhouse gas emissions.
But a soon-to-be proposed bill in the Massachusetts House would take a step in the opposite direction, weakening the state’s 2030 climate mandate to lower greenhouse gas emissions by making the target nonbinding.
The bill would also gut aspects of the state’s energy-efficiency program, Mass Save, in an attempt to save people money on their energy bills. It would do that by lowering the program’s budget, paid for by ratepayers, in addition to other cost-saving measures, according to a copy of the bill viewed by The Boston Globe.
That could result in short-term savings, but critics of the bill say it’s a long-term loser.
The bill “is a five-alarm fire,” said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director for the advocacy group the Acadia Center, who is among the many climate and clean energy advocates in the state dismayed by the proposed legislation.
To read the full article from Boston Globe, click here.
‘We will fill the State House’: Advocates gird for a showdown over House plan to dial back climate commitments
Any Democrat in Massachusetts eyeing ways to slow down the state’s ambitious commitments to move away from planet-warming fossil fuels knows they’re asking for trouble with environmental advocates.
That’s exactly what’s already playing out as a key member of the House prepares to advance a plan to ease 2030 climate targets and cut the budget for the state’s energy efficiency program.
Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director at the nonprofit group Acadia Center, said in a statement that while the state must adapt to new roadblocks posed by the federal government, policymakers should “redouble efforts” to meet the climate targets.
“Simply put, weakening targets is essentially granting the state permission to fail, and failure is not acceptable – certainly not five years before a deadline,” he said.
To read the full article from Commonwealth Beacon, click here.
Newport Officials Lukewarm on Proposed Moratorium on New Natural Gas Hookups
NEWPORT, R.I. — After rejections from Middletown and Portsmouth, city officials are skeptical of a proposed Aquidneck Island-wide ban on new natural gas hookups.
On Wednesday, City Council members and members of the city’s Energy and Environment Commission held an information workshop at City Hall. The goal was to become informed on the pros and cons of an island-wide moratorium as proposed by the state Energy Facility Siting Board (EFSB).
Environmental groups — the Conservation Law Foundation, Acadia Center, and Green Energy Consumers Alliance — were on hand to answer questions, along with an attorney representing Rhode Island Energy.
To read the full article from ecoRI, click here.
Connecticut and Maine team up to fast-track renewables
Maine and Connecticut are considering working together to build renewable-energy projects faster, a strategy that could be repeated throughout the region as states with ambitious emissions-reduction goals race to take advantage of federal tax credits before they disappear.
“It makes a lot of sense for a state like Maine to piggyback on their efforts and hopefully enter into contracts for a share of the capacity that gets bid in cost-effectively,” said Jamie Dickerson, senior director of climate and clean-energy programs at Acadia Center, an advocacy group.
To read the full article from Canary Media, click here.
CT needs to plan for its energy future, but the view is cloudy
Connecticut, along with the rest of New England, has long recognized that its energy future lies in cleaning up the electricity sources in its power grid.
Another policy aspect involves what the state might do legislatively. Unlike most of its neighbors, Connecticut has kept caps on the amount of solar allowed, only loosening some of them in the last few years.
It’s also an open question whether state money would be authorized to make up some of the tax credit shortfall, or whether the state might do as Canada already does and establish an infrastructure bank to leverage private and public money into the financing pipeline, or create a Transmission Infrastructure Accelerator like California recently enacted to access low-cost public financing for such projects as a way to save money overall. The northeast-based advocacy group Acadia Center is helping the six New England states explore financing models.
To read the full article from CT Mirror, click here
Pipeline Expansion Highlights Key Questions About Gas in New England
A relatively small project aiming to increase gas pipeline capacity into New England is raising larger underlying questions about how the region will balance gas reliability and affordability with longer-term efforts to transition away from natural gas.
In joint comments submitted earlier in October, the Acadia Center and the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) wrote that the DPU must consider how the contracts “will impact not only Eversource customers, but also other gas customers, including National Grid and Unitil, whose contracts with Constellation mirror [Eversource’s].”
Climate and consumer advocates have argued that Massachusetts must be careful not to make long-term investments in the gas system that end up becoming stranded assets. Some advocates see the 10-year duration of Eversource’s proposed Algonquin expansion contracts as reflecting uncertainty about long-term gas demand on the distribution system.
Joe LaRusso, senior advocate at the Acadia Center, said he is skeptical that gas utilities will experience enough new demand to support a “a substantial increase in gas capacity into the region.”
He added that pipeline companies looking to build major new projects “can’t find the off-takers for this stuff; they can’t get it built.”
Acadia and CLF’s comments on Eversource’s contracts with Enbridge focus on Eversource’s underlying assumptions about its forecasted gas demand between 2029 and 2039. The groups highlight data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration indicating that overall residential, commercial and industrial gas demand in Massachusetts declined between 2019 and 2024.
They wrote that Eversource has provided “no basis to determine what their gas requirement will be over the term of the proposed contracts,” nor data on how “declines in statewide gas consumption in those sectors might ultimately influence either their overall consumption or their design day supply.”
To read the full article from RTO Insider, click here.
New Report Outlines a Road map for Interregional Tx in the Northeast
A new report outlines a high-level road map for cross-border interregional transmission planning in the Northeast, making the case for more coordinated planning processes across sub-regions and regulatory environments.
The analysis, authored by the energy consulting firm Power Advisory, was commissioned by the Northeast Grid Planning Forum. The forum is an initiative of Nergica, a Quebec-based clean energy research organization, and the Acadia Center. (See New Initiative Focuses on Interregional Tx Coordination in the Northeast.)
“Provinces and states could benefit through enhanced coordination and transmission project development that optimizes utilization of existing resources and enables development of new clean energy sources,” Power Advisory wrote.
While studies have shown significant potential for increased interregional transmission throughout the Northeast, “fragmented planning processes and challenges presented by differences in regulatory structures” have limited states and provinces’ ability to fully realize these benefits, the authors wrote.
They emphasized the need to build trust, increase information access and establish mechanisms to facilitate transmission partnerships across regions and borders.
“A collaborative planning framework will require new approaches to sharing information and will require harmonizing planning processes to meet the requirements and planning horizons of each jurisdiction,” Power Advisory wrote. “Transparency and engagement will provide confidence in identified needs among jurisdictions and stakeholders.”
The report highlights several recent larger-scale transmission planning efforts as evidence of growing interest in interregional planning.
In June, the Northeast States Collaborative on Interregional Transmission, which includes nine states, issued a request for information (RFI) to identify “potential interregional transmission opportunities … that improve grid reliability, support economic growth and reduce costs for consumers.”
The states asked for input on potential cost allocation methods and wrote that responses to the RFI will “inform potential future solicitations or transmission planning activities.”
International cooperation around transmission planning also has increased. In 2024, the New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers agreed to reconvene the Northeast International Committee on Energy, directing the committee to establish working groups “to pursue regional collaboration and planning on the topics of transmission, offshore wind supply chain and hard-to-decarbonize sectors.”
In Atlantic Canada, top politicians are eying a massive buildout of offshore wind generation, which would require large-scale interregional transmission developments to move the power to load centers in Canada and New England.
According to a strategic plan published by Nova Scotia, researchers have identified offshore wind sites that could host 62 GW of generation. Nova Scotia has proposed a 5,000-MW first phase of development, requiring an estimated $40 billion in capital investment to build the generation and $20 billion to build the associated transmission.
These recent efforts “indicate recognition by the key jurisdictions that current transmission planning approaches are constrained and insufficient and need to change to realize the benefits of broader regional energy system integration,” Power Advisory wrote.
To select projects, existing regional competitive transmission solicitation processes could be aligned to allow for interregional projects, or new processes could be stood up, the authors wrote.
“The recently established ISO-NE Longer-Term Transmission Planning (LTTP) process provides an instructive model for need identification across a multi-jurisdiction region,” they said.
ISO-NE is evaluating project submissions for the first iteration of its LTTP process, which is focused on increasing transmission capacity in Maine and enabling the interconnection of onshore wind generation. (See ISO-NE Reveals 1st Details of Long-term Transmission Proposals.)
States and provinces also would need to establish cost sharing processes and could take inspiration from Europe’s cross-border cost allocation methodology, the authors wrote.
Cost allocation “should ensure full consideration of all benefits evaluated in each participating jurisdiction,” including “reduced production costs, avoided capacity costs, avoidance of alternative transmission investments, improved transmission system efficiency, reliability and other benefits,” the authors added.
To address the challenges of determining needs, selecting projects and allocating costs across regulatory authorities, states and provinces should establish “a joint coordination agreement” that “formalizes collaboration and provides a clear mandate for agency staff regarding the scope of future work,” Power Advisory concluded.
This could mirror the memorandum of understanding underpinning the Northeast States Collaborative and could lay the groundwork for answering more technical questions related to modeling, information sharing and aligning existing processes, they wrote.
To read the full article from RTO Insider, click here.