Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
New England recently observed a grim milestone: the 10th anniversary of then-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo launching what amounted to a blockade against natural gas flowing into the region. Cuomo left the governor’s mansion in 2021, but his policy persists, and six states are still paying the price.
In April 2016, the Cuomo administration announced it had denied water-quality permits to the Constitution Pipeline, a project set to run from gas-producing Pennsylvania to the Albany area, where it would supply a pair of existing pipelines that run to Massachusetts and Connecticut.
This gas infrastructure was necessary, as New England had already retired a slew of coal-fired power plants in anticipation of accepting this new, cleaner fuel source. But now, with gas supply artificially constrained, New England’s gas and electricity costs are exploding, and gas power plants, without enough supply, must often switch to burning dirtier and less-efficient oil.
The water-quality approvals denied by Cuomo, mandated under the federal Clean Water Act, had historically been little more than a formality, requiring developers to take adequate care when digging near and under creek beds and rivers.
But the governor in late 2014 got spooked by his closer-than-expected primary and was going to extremes to stave off discontent on his left. Cuomo banned hydrofracking in New York’s portion of the Utica and Marcellus shale formations, keeping a cleaner energy source locked beneath the feet of some of the state’s poorest counties.
He then weaponized the permit process to give himself veto power over any new natural gas infrastructure. The pivot was so sudden that it required New York’s economic-development agency to cancel a grant it had awarded toward building a local pipeline to distribute gas from Constitution.
It wasn’t a one-off. Another pipeline, Northeast Energy Direct, had suspended work days prior in anticipation of Cuomo’s move. That pipeline would have run across Western Massachusetts and into Southern New Hampshire before terminating outside Lowell.
Together these projects would have produced both environmental and economic benefits for the region, helping to trim fuel costs for homes and businesses while allowing new, more efficient gas power plants to join the grid.
It was not to be.
In the decade before Cuomo started blocking pipelines, the average residential price of gas in Massachusetts was never more than 40 percent above the Pennsylvania mean in any one-month period — even during the polar vortex that gripped the Northeast in early 2014. The Massachusetts premium, however, has since been trending up. Massachusetts customers paid an average of double compared to their Pennsylvania counterparts between December 2024 and February 2025, thanks in large part to New York’s ongoing blockade. (The premium for both states this past winter was about 80 percent.)
Those high costs also directly affect New England’s electricity market, since half the electricity generated there comes from gas-fired power plants.
What makes New York’s obstinance more indefensible here is that New England states nudged their coal-fired plants into retirement on the understanding that cleaner-burning, more reliable gas plants could replace them. New England went from half its electricity coming from coal or oil in 1989 to less than 4 percent in 2016 as it welcomed new plants into the competitive wholesale market.
Coal has effectively disappeared from the New England grid, but the region remains hugely reliant on “fuel-switching” plants that can also burn oil when gas prices spike, as they did at the depths of this January’s deep freeze. New England, during the worst of it, shattered records from past winters by getting more than 40 percent of its electricity from burning oil because gas supply into the region had been so strained.
The physical limits of gas transmission have caused local gas utilities in Western Massachusetts and New Hampshire to suspend new gas hookups, producing knock-on effects like complicating housing construction. The region’s high gas and electricity prices threaten not just the expansion but also survival of energy-intensive manufacturing businesses.
New York is blocking pipelines, but some energy still flows: “Virtual pipelines” have popped up across the Northeast as gas gets compressed in Pennsylvania and trucked to points north and east, albeit at a considerable cost premium. Meanwhile power plants in upstate New York burn natural gas and export the electricity to Quebec, where the state-run utility in turn sends power to New England states.
New England states have some options: They could press their federal representatives to shield the Clean Water Act from New York’s abuse or they could directly confront New York in federal court. So far, doing neither is proving costly.