The state Department of Public Utilities is investigating how much new natural gas capacity the state needs to help lower skyrocketing electricity prices.
“It’s the catalyst to get a pipe in the ground,” Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Matthew Beaton said yesterday on Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting.” “The goal is to essentially set the framework for us to start actually putting things in motion to try to get a pipeline in the ground.”
Electricity prices in Massachusetts have skyrocketed in recent years, increases the utilities blame on insufficient supply of natural gas, which is used to run power plants to generate electricity. The state’s two major utilities — National Grid and Eversource — hiked rates 37 percent and 29 percent respectively last winter, and although rates are being cut this summer, they are still higher than last year.
The Department of Public Utilities will try to determine the best way to add natural gas capacity, Beaton said, to keep electric rates in check.
“It’ll really help us to have a true understanding of how much we need, where we need it and where it’s going to come from,” he said. “That is a bridge to what hopefully will be a much more reliant system on renewable technologies.”
Ratepayers, Beaton said, will likely not see the same level of rate hikes next winter because of plummeting oil prices at the end of last year. Electric rates, he said, take into account prices paid the previous year.
Although a pipeline is likely years away, Beaton said there are steps that can be taken now to lower consumer energy prices, including better managing peak usage, which can drive prices even higher.
