Piping more gas up from Pennsylvania’s ample supplies could seem like an economically sensible way to bolster the grid in light of these facts. The reality is far more complicated, however, say advocates and experts.
The major problem is that the pipeline wouldn’t actually bring much, if any, new gas into New England, Dolan said. The Constitution pipeline would terminate in Schoharie County, New York, where it would connect to pipes that already carry gas into New England. That existing infrastructure is the true bottleneck, he said.
The pipes into and around New England are “narrow and limited,” so bringing a higher volume of gas into New York doesn’t mean more can flow throughout the neighboring region. There are no plans in the works to alleviate those constraints, and the models for funding such projects make it highly unlikely there will be any proposals for pipelines into or within New England in the near future, Dolan said.
“I am not aware of any large-scale gas supply projects into New England today,” he said. “Until there is a way to increase that, I struggle to see how Constitution changes anything meaningful for us.”
Furthermore, multiple New England states are enacting plans to transition away from natural gas for home heating and appliances. In late 2023, Massachusetts regulators laid out plans for transitioning gas utilities toward clean energy, with the explicit goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. In May 2025, Maine opened an investigation into the future of its gas utilities. These efforts could reduce demand for natural gas for heating, freeing up some supply for power plants, Dolan said.
Even if new pipelines increased New England’s gas supply, that influx of fuel would be unlikely to consistently lower prices in the long term, experts said. Despite the appealing logic that more supply leads to lower costs, natural gas prices are inherently volatile and susceptible to influence by global events. In 2022, for example, the wholesale price more than tripled from its 2020 level, hitting $6.45 per million British thermal units, after Russia invaded Ukraine. Last year, the average price was $2.20; next year it is forecast to hit $4.30, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
“The region is already over-reliant on natural gas,” said Sarah Krame, staff attorney with the Sierra Club’s environmental law program. “That is why we have seen volatile and skyrocketing gas and electricity bills in recent years.”
A better solution to both price and reliability worries, said advocates, would be to build a system that simply requires less gas.
That would mean relying on a diverse portfolio of options that includes solar, offshore wind, battery storage, energy efficiency, and demand-response programs. Such resources could be coordinated to create virtual power plants — a collection of geographically distributed resources that can work together to supply power to the grid and reduce demand. Not only do these networks emit less greenhouse gases than fossil-fueled plants, but their components can be built more quickly and cheaply, McDiarmid said.
This approach already had a chance to prove itself this summer, when solar and storage worked together to lower peak demand during a heat wave that saw temperatures hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit around the region, noted Amy Boyd Rabin, vice president of policy and regulatory affairs at the Environmental League of Massachusetts.
“To me that’s a sign that we need more renewables, not that we need to double down on fossil fuels,” she said.
