Background
Investor owned utilities in Massachusetts spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to make sure that the Statehouse doesn’t interfere with their profits. Utilities pay lobbyists at the statehouse who relentlessly advocate for utility interests but they also exercise influence through individual donations to legislators from company executives and other senior employees. While PACs can donate unlimited funds to the campaigns of legislators, individuals can donate up to $1,000 per year and lobbyists can donate $200. Though they may seem small, these individual donations can add up.
It is abundantly clear that in order for the MA Statehouse to make robust progress on an equitable energy transition and energy affordability, utility influence must be dampened. To help illuminate this influence, Mass Power Forward has put together a dashboard containing publicly available data from the Office of Campaign and Political Finance that tracks the amount of donations flowing from senior employees at utilities to the campaigns of our legislators.
Read more about the donation sources included, methods, our findings, and how to get more involved below.
Don’t know who your state legislator is? Find out here.
What did we find?
- Donations from senior utility employees to the campaigns of sitting legislators have increased dramatically over the past decade, as robust climate policy becomes more and more necessary.
- Senior Eversource employees have donated $88,690 to the campaigns of sitting legislators. Senior National Grid employees have donated $44,560 and Keegan Werlin LLC. (legal counsel for utilities) employees have donated $40,375. Senior employees of Avangrid, Liberty Utilities, The Berkshire Gas Company and Unitil have donated a combined total of $21,857.
- Total donations from senior employees of utilities, utility lobby firms, and utility PACs from 2002 to 2026 equal $223,307.
Want to get more involved?
- Ask your legislator to sign the no utility money challenge
- Set up a 1:1 with one of us to hear more about the challenge, the dashboard, and how we can advocate to put people over energy profits. Email eva.morgan@sierraclub.org to get started.
Donation sources included
Eversource: a gas and electric distribution utility serving large parts of eastern and western Massachusetts. Eversource’s natural gas service includes 121 towns and their electric service includes 159 towns. Eversource is the parent company of NSTAR Gas, NSTAR Electric, and EGMA.
National Grid: a gas and electric distribution utility serving pockets of central, eastern, and western Massachusetts. National Grid delivers natural gas and/or electricity to around 2.3 million customers in Massachusetts.
Keegan Werlin LLC: a lobbying and legal firm that is employed by utilities to advocate for their interests at the Statehouse and at the Department of Public Utilities and Energy Facilities Siting Board.
NiSource PAC of MA: a political action committee to support utility interests. This PAC has been inactive as of 2020.
Avangrid: a multinational energy company that produces and delivers electricity and natural gas. Avangrid is the parent company of Berkshire Gas.
Unitil: a gas and electric distribution utility serving four towns in northern Massachusetts.
Liberty Utilities: a natural gas distribution utility serving ten towns in southern Massachusetts.
Berkshire Gas: a natural gas distribution utility serving twenty towns in western Massachusetts.
*We tracked and aggregated donations from individuals who are employed by these utility companies. We included donations from senior employees, namely executives, directors, attorneys, lobbyists and others that may have corporate or political influence.
We only included donations from one lobbying firm, Keegan Werlin LLC., that is only employed by utilities. Likely other lobbyists who represent utility interests are donating to legislators, but these lobbyists also work for companies in other sectors, so they were not included. Because of this, the numbers represented in this dashboard are likely an underestimation of the magnitude of utility contributions to legislators.
Methods
Data was most recently downloaded from OCPF on September 18, 2026 for all 200 Massachusetts State Legislature positions (note that three seats are currently vacant). We then cleaned and parsed the data in a number of ways. First, we corrected spelling variations in legislator names, ensuring names appeared consistently. Next, we searched through listed names for utility PACs and employer names for utilities or utility lobbying firms. We did this for all donations, and filtered out donations unrelated to utilities, utility lobbying firms, or utility PACs. Once again we cleaned the data to correct spelling variations in donation source names, as well as occupation titles. At this point, roles that did not meet our criteria for senior-level employees were removed from the data set, which left us with 881 donations across all legislators for a total of $223,307.