Inside Mass. DPU Docket 25-20 and the push for proactive grid planning

The distribution grid is the threshold constraint on clean energy deployment in Massachusetts, and there is now a proceeding that could fix it. 

On June 22, 2026 ACT and the Clean Energy Coalition filed surrebuttal testimony in D.P.U. 25-20 at the MA Department of Public Utilities, closing the direct testimony phase of what could become the first binding, proactive distribution system planning process in the country. Briefings follow before the end of September. After that, we await a decision from the Department.

We have never been closer to getting this right. If we do, Massachusetts will be able to plan its grid ahead of the pipeline, bring down the soft costs that have made otherwise viable projects unfeasible, and give the clean energy industry a real path to the deployment pace the Commonwealth's goals require. 

This blog is the story of how we got here, what the proceeding is trying to resolve, and what a good outcome means for developers, ratepayers, and the region. 

The problem the clean energy industry has been enduring

For many clean energy developers working in Massachusetts, the distribution grid has become the threshold constraint on deployment. Projects that clear every other hurdle stall because there is no available hosting capacity at the relevant substation, or because the cost to create that capacity is unknown or out of reach. 

Clean energy is cost-competitive. The technology works. The underlying economics are real. Yet many projects are still failing to proceed, because the system they need to connect to was built for a different world and has not been planned to facilitate the transition it is now being asked to absorb.

The distribution grid was designed for centralized, unidirectional power flow to predictable loads. Distributed renewables and storage, combined with electrification of transportation and heating, invert that paradigm. The result is capacity exhaustion at specific substations and circuits where the system cannot safely absorb new resources without physical upgrades. When a project tries to connect in one of those areas, it triggers an upgrade requirement.

Under the historical cost framework, the project that triggers the upgrade pays for it. That logic held for large power plants where interconnection costs were a manageable share of total development. For community-scale solar, C&I installations, and storage projects, a multimillion-dollar substation upgrade may exceed total project development cost many times over.

The harm extends beyond individual projects. Interconnection cost uncertainty is a front-end driver that inflates financing costs across the portfolio, because lenders and investors are pricing risk they cannot quantify. The opacity of the reactive process makes clean energy more expensive to develop than the underlying technical need warrants.

The Provisional Program: A real advance, and its limits

Massachusetts took a meaningful step in 2021 toward solving the cost-allocation problem with the Provisional Program. NECEC, as ACT was then known, was actively engaged in that docket. The Provisional Program replaced the triggering-project-pays model with a beneficiary-pays framework: projects in queue at the same substation were pooled and studied as a cohort, with costs allocated between developers, who were charged for the incremental capacity their projects require. Ratepayers were charged just for the share that benefits the broader system. That shift made more projects financeable and established the right underlying logic for how distribution infrastructure costs should be shared.

The Provisional Program is now winding down. While its creation was a crucial step in the right direction, it had a core structural limitation: it was reactive to interconnection requests rather than organized around a plan. Projects had to accumulate in a queue before the utility initiated a study, the study took time, and any resulting capital-investment proposal entered the DPU process was litigated, often for years. By the time capacity was created, the conditions that made financing possible had often evaporated. The model also built capacity where the market happened to concentrate projects rather than where it best met the Commonwealth's policy goals.

Proactive system planning: Taking control of our energy future

The distribution system will expand; it was always going to. The grid serves a growing economy, and demand for electricity is rising with or without clean energy policy. The question is, what will meet that demand: continued dependence on fossil fuel generation, or cost-effective, clean energy resources that put Massachusetts ratepayers and policymakers in control of the Commonwealth's energy future?

DER integration makes that choice possible. Proactive planning makes it achievable.

Proactive planning actively reduces the costs that the reactive model generated and obscured. Infrastructure can be sized and sited in coordination with Commonwealth energy goals rather than wherever queues happened to form. The upgrade-by-upgrade litigation cycle that characterized the Provisional Program era – one contested substation proposal at a time – is set to give way to a coordinated process with known timelines and predictable cost structures. Developers will gain advance certainty about where hosting capacity will exist and when, the kind of certainty that reduces financing risk, compresses development timelines, and lets economically sound projects actually get built.

This is what timeline and regulatory certainty are worth in practice. They lead to lower soft costs across the development process, a more legible pipeline, and the ability to bring homegrown clean energy online at the pace the state's goals require. Clean energy resources are now cheaper to operate than the fossil fuel generation they replace. Getting them connected efficiently is how Massachusetts captures that value for ratepayers rather than spending it on process friction.

The Long Term System Planning Process, known as the LTSPP, is the framework under consideration in DPU 25-20 that would make proactive planning a reality. 

How we got here & industry’s role in driving the process

The LTSPP exists because the industry organized to make it happen. Policymakers and other stakeholders, including consumer and environmental advocates, quickly recognized its value. 

Building on the work started with the Provisional Program, the 2022 Massachusetts climate law required utilities to file Electric Sector Modernization Plans and created a Grid Modernization Advisory Council to oversee the process. When the utilities filed their initial ESMPs without adequately addressing proactive planning for distributed generation hosting capacity, a coalition of trade associations, operating as the Clean Energy Coalition, intervened in the DPU's ESMP review. The coalition's argument was that such planning was a statutory requirement under the legislation, not a discretionary enhancement.

ACT – appearing in the ESMP dockets as NECEC – convened and led that coalition, which brought together Advanced Energy United, the Solar Energy Industries Association, the Coalition for Community Solar Access, and the Solar Energy Business Association of New England. The Clean Energy Coalition achieved a major victory in the DPU's decision, winning every element of the remedy it sought: the finding that proactive DG hosting-capacity planning is statutorily required, the directive to the utilities to address it, and the six-month stakeholder process that produced the LTSPP framework.

That stakeholder process ran from October 2024 through May 2025. It worked because everyone came to the table prepared to engage. The DPU directed a process that gave those exchanges room to develop. The utilities brought proposals and worked through the details. And the industry, the Department of Energy Resources, and the Attorney General's Office participated actively, shaping the framework and pressing on its harder questions. The result is a framework the coalition largely supports, with specific elements it believes should be refined. Docket 25-20 is where those refinements will be settled.

Where things stand with Docket 25-20 

Eversource, National Grid, and Unitil filed the LTSPP proposal now under DPU review in Docket 25-20. The electric distribution companies and all stakeholders share the common goal of implementing a proactive planning process. 

The open questions are design questions: how capacity needs are identified and projected, how stakeholders can shape implementation, and how the operational mechanics of the process will function in practice. These are complex problems being worked on by parties who largely agree on the destination.

The proceeding is going well, but what will really matter is the DPU’s final order.

What comes next

With direct testimony closed, the proceeding moves to its final stages, with briefings expected before the end of September. A decision from the Department will follow. What gets established in that decision will determine whether Massachusetts ends up with a proactive planning process that actually works for developers and delivers on the ratepayer-protection it promises.

The outcome matters for every developer trying to bring viable projects to completion, for ratepayers who will fund a distribution buildout regardless of how it is planned, and for the rest of New England watching Massachusetts work through a problem the whole region shares.

If you are interested in this proceeding and want to engage, whether you have a stake in the outcome, experience in similar proceedings elsewhere, or simply want to understand what the coalition is arguing and why, reach out to me at tsnyder@joinact.org.  

The industry built this opportunity together. Getting the next steps right is the same kind of work.

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