Fair energy siting in Massachusetts starts with looking at the full picture – where projects are built, what surrounds them, and how nearby communities may be affected. Photo: Alex McLean.
Massachusetts is building the clean energy future our communities deserve. But we can’t repeat past mistakes. For years, the rules for deciding where energy projects get built have looked at projects one by one. That approach failed to fully account for what communities already host and live alongside – highways, airports, industrial facilities, and other infrastructure serving the broader region.
Communities have been calling out that gap for a long time. In East Boston, New Bedford, Springfield, and across Massachusetts, residents and advocates have pushed for a better system – one that looks at the full picture before adding new infrastructure.
CLF and our partners helped turn those calls into policy – winning rules that require the state to ask whether a project truly belongs before it moves forward.
The Problem
For years, agencies focused on the impacts a proposed energy project would bring to an area – largely ignoring the pollution, flooding, traffic, and public health risks that communities already lived with every day. The result was predictable: the neighborhoods already carrying the most burdens kept getting more – not because they didn’t resist, but because the law let agencies look away.
When agencies look at one project at a time, they miss the reality communities live with every day. A fair siting process can’t just weigh the impact of what a developer wants to build – it has to account for the burdens the people in a neighborhood already deal with.
One case became a defining example of how broken the old system was. For more than a decade, East Boston residents, GreenRoots, and CLF fought Eversource’s proposed electrical substation – a fight that went all the way to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Boston voters rejected the location by about 84% in a nonbinding referendum. The community did everything right – but the project was allowed to move forward anyway. The old rules didn’t fully require the state to weigh all the burdens East Boston already carried.
CLF in Action
Our goal was straightforward: force the state to stop pretending each new project lands on a blank slate. CLF drove that fight for years – in court, in communities, at the State House, and through the rulemaking process.
In 2023, CLF petitioned the state to strengthen climate and permitting rules so siting decisions would protect communities and stop new projects from adding pollution and climate–damaging emissions. CLF then helped win stronger siting reforms in the 2024 Climate Act, signed into law by Governor Healey in November of that year. The law overhauled energy siting and permitting and, for certain energy facilities, required cumulative impact analysis – a hard look at how a new project’s impacts add to what a community already experiences. It was a major shift toward the fairer process communities had been demanding.
As the state turned the law into rules, CLF stayed at the table – with Caitlin Peale Sloan, CLF’s vice president for climate and energy, serving on the siting and permitting commission. Throughout 2025 and 2026, CLF submitted comments, joined public meetings, and pushed for rules strong enough to work for communities.
Progress
After years of pressure, Massachusetts has made these reforms official. Starting July 1, 2026, the Energy Facilities Siting Board – the agency in charge of evaluating energy projects – will begin accepting applications under the new process for large clean energy infrastructure projects. Now, projects proposed in environmental justice communities – including large solar farms, electrical substations, and major transmission lines – will have to weigh what a community already lives with and give residents a real say before moving forward.
The new rules require cumulative impact analysis for projects in areas already feeling the weight of existing burdens. Using the state’s MassEnviroScreen tool, agencies will now evaluate whether a community already ranks above the state median on factors like flood risk, asthma rates, or exposure to industrial pollution – before approving new infrastructure that could make things worse. That scrutiny will extend to fossil fuel projects too. For the first time, dirty energy proposals will face a level of review that actually matches the harm they carry, exactly as communities have demanded for years.
Through the 2024 Climate Act, the state has also established grant funding opportunities so communities can bring in their own experts during siting reviews – with applications opening July 1 alongside the new rules.
On the ground, that means residents get a real voice earlier in the process – and developers must reckon with what a neighborhood already experiences before adding to it. Massachusetts is proving what other states should take note of: We don’t have to choose between protecting environmental justice communities and advancing the projects we need for a cleaner, more productive economy.
Next Steps
Now the real work begins – making sure these reforms give communities the power to influence where and how new energy projects get built.
CLF will track the first applications filed, and we will not let agencies turn a critical review process into a simple checkbox. We’ll work closely alongside communities ready to weigh in early, helping them use tools like MassEnviroScreen and demand the information developers are required to put on the table from the start.
Ultimately, strong rules only work when communities can use them, and agencies enforce them. CLF will stay on the case to make sure both happen.
A fair, clean energy future is not just about what Massachusetts builds. It is about how we build it, where we build it, and who shapes the process. These reforms give communities real power before decisions are made – and we intend to make sure that power remains in their hands.
