Escalating Conflict with Utilities Leads to Resignation of Top Conn. Regulator
The forthcoming resignation of Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) Chair Marissa Gillett has created high-stakes questions around the state’s adoption of a comprehensive performance-based regulation (PBR) framework, with three key votes set to occur just two days before Gillett is scheduled to step down.
Noah Berman, utility innovation program manager at the Acadia Center, said he would be “surprised to see a major pivot” in the PBR dockets from the proposed rulings.
“The question is whether the utilities decide to act in good faith on what is being established, or to put aside the years of work that have gone into these frameworks in favor of trying to delay and relitigate under a new chair,” Berman said.
He expressed concern about a “post-resignation inquiry” that Avangrid submitted in the three PBR dockets, which argues Gillett “must have no further involvement” in all open dockets involving the company.
To read the full article from RTO Insider, click here.
Statement on Chair Marissa Gillett’s Resignation from the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority
September 24, 2025
MEDIA CONTACTS
Will Taylor
Strategy Director, Infrastructure and Resilience
wtaylor@acadiacenter.com; 860-246-7121 x203
Noah Berman
Senior Policy Advocate and Utility Innovation Program Manager
nberman@acadiacenter.org; 617-742-0054 x107
Acadia Center applauds Marissa Gillett’s tenure as Public Utility Regulatory Authority Chair and highlights her accomplishments in the role.
Encourages next PURA Chair to “maintain a strong stance on what rates are just and reasonable, and further the work done to establish Connecticut as a national leader in modernizing utility ratemaking.”
HARTFORD, CT – Public Utility Regulatory Authority’s (PURA) Chair Marissa Gillett’s tenure has witnessed significant accomplishments regarding cost savings and modernizing Connecticut’s approach to setting rates and establishing a performance-based ratemaking framework. “Chair Gillett consistently sought fair outcomes when utilities came to PURA to adjust their rates, ensuring only costs that were truly prudent and reasonable would be passed on to ratepayers,” said Will Taylor, Strategy Director, Infrastructure and Resilience, at Acadia Center. “Her unswerving dedication to utility prudence has been a bulwark to Connecticut ratepayers, saving them millions of dollars in rate increases.” Notable advances made throughout the Chair’s tenure, which have withstood judicial scrutiny five times at the Connecticut Supreme Court, include:
- In 2024, PURA directed the Connecticut Natural Gas (CNG) and The Southern Connecticut Gas (SCG) Companies to return $24 million and $96 million to ratepayers over 3 years, respectively. In part because of these directives, the revenue requirements approved by PURA represented $24.6 million and $10.7 million in reductions from current revenues.
- In 2023, PURA approved rates for Aquarion Water Company that represented an average decrease to customer bills of $67/year. Paired with the Water Infrastructure Conservation Adjustment (WICA) surcharge being reset to $0; customer rates were decreased 11%. This ruling included a reduction of requested revenue requirements for operations and maintenance costs of $10.7 million, because the company failed to show they would benefit ratepayers. Aquarion had requested an increase of $37 million in distribution revenues.
- In 2023, PURA approved rate adjustments for The United Illuminating Company (UI), increasing bills by 2% in response to UI’s requested rate increase of 11% over 3 years. Under Chair Gillett, PURA determined that a return on equity of 9.10% was sufficient, but not more than sufficient, to allow the Company a reasonable return—much reduced from the 10.20% ROE proposed by the company. Holding the utility accountable, PURA included a downward adjustment of 0.47% to an effective ROE of 8.63%, reflecting UI’s management and operational deficiencies.
- In 2025, PURA advanced a new framework for performance-based ratemaking (PBR) by issuing three draft decisions that lay out how Connecticut’s utilities will be regulated going forward. The draft rulings propose shifting utilities onto multi-year rate plans with revenue caps, adopting clear performance scorecards and financial incentives tied to reliability, affordability, clean energy, and equity, and requiring a transparent grid planning process that evaluates non-wires alternatives alongside traditional investments.
These decisions represent significant achievements in reducing ratepayer costs while advancing affordable clean energy. PBR in particular is a critically important step to modernize Connecticut’s outdated approach to utility ratemaking. PBR is a common sense, alternative utility regulatory framework that ties financial incentives for utilities to measurable performance outcomes rather than simply allowing recovery of costs for capital investments. PBR helps to align utility behavior with customer interests and public policy goals. It encourages cost efficiency, innovation, and improved service quality while promoting clean energy adoption, equity, and resilience by removing traditional cost-of-service biases. For ratepayers, a successful PBR framework means that utility financial success is more directly linked to delivering tangible benefits — such as lower costs, better reliability, and progress on clean energy — than to how much the utility spends. That should be welcome news for the people of Connecticut.
Under Chair Gillett, PURA has ensured that utility returns are sufficient but prudent — resulting in at least tens of millions of savings for ratepayers — and worked diligently to establish a PBR framework to bring cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable power to the people of Connecticut for many years to come. “Chair Gillett has faithfully served the people of Connecticut by advancing a more affordable, equitable, and sustainable energy future,” said Taylor.
“It is regrettable that she has been subjected to such an unrelenting barrage of attacks while consistently fulfilling her duties. Acadia Center hopes that the next PURA chair will maintain a strong stance on what rates are just and reasonable, and further the work done to establish Connecticut as a national leader in modernizing utility ratemaking.”
State energy efficiency programs face the chopping block
Both New York and Massachusetts this year have slashed budgets for their energy efficiency programs, and now a third state is poised to.
What’s happening: Rhode Island Energy, the state’s dominant power utility, is proposing funding cuts to its energy efficiency plan for 2026 — budgeting 18 percent below last year’s level and $42 million less than initially projected in 2023.
The other side: Nonprofit Acadia Center noted in an analysis that the state’s proposed cuts could put 833 jobs at risk and make customers’ electric and gas bills more expensive in future years, while Canary Media reported that the cuts would save the average household just $1.87 per month.
To read the full article from HomePros, click here.
Op-Ed: How clean energy met the moment in the New England summer of 2025
This summer, New England experienced multiple record-breaking heat waves. In June, Boston had its warmest start to summer on record, and Providence hit 100 degrees for the first time. Globally, the last 10 years have been the hottest ever recorded, and that trend is expected to continue.
Every summer now feels like a new record-breaker; heat is no longer an anomaly but our new reality. This isn’t just about discomfort. Extreme heat is a present and intensifying crisis, straining our health, our infrastructure, and our wallets.
And yet, when the heat was at its worst, it wasn’t fossil fuels that kept the power on: it was clean energy. This summer proved that renewables aren’t just a future promise; they are already delivering reliable, affordable, and resilient power when New England needs it most.
On June 24, when Boston’s heat index was projected to soar as high as 110 degrees, ISO New England, the customer-funded nonprofit responsible for managing the regional transmission grid, issued a series of escalating “power cautions” to prevent blackouts. At stake were rolling outages across the region, which would have put lives at risk, especially for older residents, medically vulnerable populations, and families without access to cooling. In this context, air conditioning is not a luxury, it is a lifesaving necessity.
That day, solar panels on homes, schools, businesses, and larger arrays provided up to 22% of the region’s power, nearly double their daily average. This reliable output stabilized the grid and saved customers tens of millions of dollars in a single day. Without solar, electricity prices, which were already climbing, could have spiked even higher.
And it wasn’t just solar: elsewhere in the Northeast offshore wind helped come to the rescue as well, especially in New York, where the South Fork Wind Farm hit an 87% capacity factor during a recent summer heat wave peak. This production drives huge reliability and affordability benefits, making the Trump Administration’s recent actions to halt offshore wind projects all the more shocking and harmful.
Ordinarily, during periods of peak demand, New England relies on “peaker plants” powered by oil, gas, and coal, fuels that are dirtier and more expensive.
These plants drive up energy bills, worsen air pollution, and increase carbon emissions just when we can least afford it. Many are located in New England’s environmental justice communities, where residents already bear disproportionate health burdens from asthma, heart disease, and other pollution-related illnesses. Relying on them during heat emergencies deepens inequity and endangers public health.
What’s more, these fossil facilities are aging and often unreliable due to heightened outage risks correlated to extreme heat conditions, which actually occurred on June 24, with a major unexpected loss of generation in the late afternoon — right as temperatures, demand, and prices soared highest.
It is no surprise that fossil fuel-funded groups are pushing disinformation campaigns that blame renewables for rising energy costs when in fact the reality is the opposite: renewables lower prices over time and reduce dependence on volatile fossil fuels. This summer demonstrated that clean energy can meet demand while maintaining reliability, delivering benefits for both the grid and consumers.
This summer was just a preview of what awaits us.
Extreme heat will only intensify across Massachusetts and New England in the coming years, placing unprecedented strain on the electric grid and putting all our communities’ health at risk, in particular, environmental justice communities, the elderly, and young children. While investments in solar, efficiency, offshore wind, and storage helped us through this year, much more must be done to prepare for future summers.
The progress we have made did not happen by accident. Decades of state-level investment in solar incentives, energy efficiency programs like MassSave, offshore wind projects, and battery storage created the foundation that allowed clean energy to step in when it mattered most and to grow in the future. As the federal government retreats from climate leadership, Massachusetts must continue to lead.
We can build on this success by scaling up what already works. That means expanding offshore wind, putting solar on every viable rooftop, procuring all cost-effective energy efficiency, and modernizing the grid so clean energy can flow where it is needed most. It also means phasing out fossil-fuel peaker plants, which jeopardize public health and impose the greatest costs on our most vulnerable communities.
Last year, the Massachusetts Office of Energy Transformation launched a process to eliminate fossil fuels from peaking power plants and combined heat and power facilities. Expanding access to energy efficiency and clean energy for all households, not just those who can afford it, will lower bills, reduce demand, and strengthen resilience across neighborhoods.
We need our elected officials to continue advocating for and accelerating grid modernization, and fighting back against the disinformation that clouds public debate. We have the tools to lower costs, protect public health, and build a more resilient energy system.
So the question isn’t whether Massachusetts can lead, it’s whether our leaders will ignore the noise and rise to the moment. When the next heat wave hits, it won’t be fossil fuels that save us. It will be the clean energy we choose to invest in today.
Larry Chretien is executive director of the Green Energy Consumers Alliance. Lindsay Griffin is Vote Solar’s regulatory director of the Northeast. Britteny Jenkins is vice president of environmental justice at Conservation Law Foundation. Kyle Murray is the Massachusetts program director at Acadia Center.
To read the article from MassLive, click here.
Gas bills on the rise as temperatures drop for fall 2025-winter 2026
Winter will soon be here, and so too could higher heating bill for many across Massachusetts. Here’s how much they’re expected to spike going into 2026.
Policy Advocate Noah Berman, discussing cost cutting regulatory suggestions,
“When the pipes are at the end of their useful life instead of putting in a new gas system is to start to electrify those customers instead.”
To watch the full interview from NBC Boston, click here.
Cuts to Rhode Island energy-efficiency plan bad for residents, study says
Funding for Rhode Island’s energy-efficiency programs could be cut by more than $42 million next year in an effort to rein in residents’ soaring power bills. That rollback would deprive the state of more than $90 million in benefits and potentially eliminate hundreds of jobs while creating only modest up-front savings, a new analysis finds.
Rhode Island Energy, the utility that administers the state’s energy-efficiency offerings, has proposed to slash spending on that front by 18% compared to last year and more than 30% compared to the budget originally projected in the nonbinding three-year plan introduced in 2023. If approved, the cuts will save the average household $1.87 per month, according to Rhode Island Energy.
The result of these changes, according to climate action nonprofit Acadia Center, would be more expensive electricity and more exposure to volatile natural gas prices in the long run.
“Energy efficiency is a tool for suppressing supply costs, for suppressing infrastructure costs in the long-term,” said Emily Koo, Acadia Center’s program director for Rhode Island and one of the authors of the group’s analysis. “I am not seeing our leaders think beyond the immediate.”
Acadia Center’s analysis also finds that more than 800 jobs in the energy-efficiency sector could be at risk if the cuts are adopted.
To read the full article from Canary Media, click here.
‘Status quo roadmap’: Critics say new RI transportation plan fails climate, transit goals
Rhode Island planners have approved a new version of the state’s 10-year transportation funding plan over objections that it is too focused on automobiles and will not do enough to meet the state’s climate goals.
The State Transportation Improvement Plan for 2026-2025 lays out $11.5 billion worth of spending over that period, including construction, maintenance, highways, streets, sidewalks, bridges, buses and ferries.
Despite his big-picture opposition, Wolf said positive projects in the new 10-year plan included the Kingston Station Mobility Hub, Westerly Train Station platform upgrades, Mount Hope Bay Greenway and Wakefield Main Street improvements.
Grow Smart RI is part of a dozen-group coalition, including the Acadia Center, Save RIPTA and the Conservation Law Foundation, that wrote with a series of requests to the Planning Council including:
- A detailed account of how the state DOT plans to reduce carbon emissions and take steps to reduce driving instead of relying on a transition to electric cars
- A separate plan section on how the state intends to execute the Transit Master Plan
- Shift some flexible federal transportation funding toward RIPTA
- Put funding behind plans to electrify the MBTA’s Providence Line
- Build dedicated bus lanes on existing highway lanes and include a carpool lane on the new westbound Washington Bridge.
To read the full article from the Providence Journal, click here.
Acadia Center Responds to Governor McKee (RI)’s Rate Relief Announcement
September 12, 2025
The two settlements highlighted in the Governor’s rate relief announcement are examples of our regulatory bodies holding the utility accountable to their obligations and refunding money already owed to ratepayers. Acadia Center thanks the DPUC and PUC for their tireless efforts on this front and appreciates the immediate relief these returns offer for Rhode Islanders struggling with energy costs.
However, we cannot rely on settlements alone to provide rate relief year after year in the future. In addition to ongoing regulatory oversight, Rhode Islanders need long-lasting, renewing tools to help protect against rising energy costs. Energy efficiency is one such key tool – it lowers energy bills year after year, at the household and business level and across the gas and electric systems by proactively reducing supply and infrastructure costs.
Unfortunately, Rhode Island’s energy efficiency programs are facing significant cuts this year, despite cost-effectively providing tangible benefits for Rhode Islanders. Acadia Center urges that proposed program cuts be reversed and the accompanying savings be added to an even more robust and enduring rate relief package from the McKee Administration this fall.
Reporting by the Providence Journal
Media Contact:
Emily Koo, ekoo@acadiacenter.org, 401-276-0600 x402
New Hampshire has never been a trailblazer on solar, but clean energy proponents still see a path
New Hampshire has been slower than the rest of New England to lean into renewable electricity generation, including through solar power. And while some opportunities to change that will likely arise during the upcoming legislative session, it’s not yet clear whether lawmakers will have an appetite to pursue them.
This principle was particularly visible in New England this June, when a buffer from behind-the-meter solar — meaning arrays installed at the site of use, such as residential rooftop panels — saved consumers an estimated $8.2 million in peak electricity pricing on one particularly hot day, according to a report by renewable energy advocacy nonprofit The Acadia Center.
To read the full article from the New Hampshire Bulletin, click here.
Anti-Renewable Policies Will Cost Ratepayers
The Mad King’s fever dream of energy dominance is designed to reward the fossil fuel industry and punish renewable energy. It will prove costly to both ratepayers and public health.
It’s also doomed to fail, according to energy economics experts.
Jamie Dickerson, senior director of climate and clean energy programs at the Acadia Center, said the actions taken by the regime to halt offshore wind projects and port infrastructure along the East Coast will “increase utility bills for families and businesses by hundreds of millions of dollars annually, jeopardize reliable power, and kill thousands of good-paying, union jobs.”
Dickerson noted these stoppages and withdrawn funding will make energy systems more vulnerable to extreme weather, weaken federal-state energy system planning and collaboration, and erode investor confidence and market stability that will, like the IEEFA said, undermine future investment in needed grid infrastructure.
“From any point of view, halting work on established wind projects that states energy officials are relying on to meet power needs, clean the air, and reduce system costs defies the facts and simply makes no sense,” Dickerson said.
To read the full article from ecoRI, click here.