Healey says Mass. will shave $180 million from residents’ electric bills in bid to ease rising energy costs

Healey’s office said to cover the $180 million the state is paying to cut electric bills, her administration would use what are called alternative compliance payment funds. Electric utilities and suppliers are required by state law to buy a certain amount of renewable energy each year, but when they fall short, they must make so-called compliance payments to the state.

Under Healey’s plan, those payments will effectively flow back to ratepayers, similar to last year when her administration gave customers a $50 credit on their spring electric bills.

Residents will also see other temporary cuts to their bills, her office said. The five utilities plan to cut customers’ electric bills by 10 percent for those two months, plus trim an estimated 10 percent off their gas bills as well. But most of the utilities will recover the costs for those discounts from customers later in the year, state officials said, including during the six-month “off-peak” season for gas costs starting in May, when heating bills are much lower.

For consumers, that means they’ll pay a less for natural gas and electricity during the thick of the winter, and then a little more over the following months.

Healey’s third State of the Commonwealth address was expected to focus heavily on the economic pain Massachusetts is feeling, and what Healey has done — and promises to do — to ease it, including in people’s rising monthly utility bills.

She’ll climb the Massachusetts House chamber dais at an uneasy time. Her administration has warned the state’s economy is slowing, and elected officials from local town halls to Beacon Hill say they’re preparing for tight fiscal times.

President Trump has over the last year upended the federal government’s relationship to Massachusetts, pushing the Republican front and center in Healey’s political and official messaging.

Her administration keeps a public tracker of federal dollars it says Trump and the Republican-led Congress have sapped from the state. In formally launching her reelection bid this week, Healey centered Trump, and her criticisms of him, in a campaign video, and will likely target him again Thursday in her address.

For a brief time last year, Healey was more measured in her criticisms. Once one of Trump’s fiercest public antagonists when she was the state’s top prosecutor, Healey later walked a careful line after he returned to the White House. She raised concerns about his plans to wield stiff tariffs, for example, but during her State of the Commonwealth speech last year — delivered days before Trump was sworn in — she didn’t mention him by name, instead promising both to work with the federal government and “to not change who we are.”

Any good faith appears to have evaporated. Healey’s campaign spliced in violent images of his administration’s immigration crackdown in a video it released this week, and Healey herself accused him of “making everything worse.”

Massachusetts voters by and large vehemently disapprove of Trump, and few, if any, news cycles can escape his orbit.

The speech, however, also offers Healey a primetime platform to tout her administration’s victories. Healey in her first term has signed legislation making school meals free, eliminating renters’ fees, and realizing long-sought tax relief. She has championed progress at the MBTA, and its leader, Phil Eng, who in a sign of her trust in him, is also concurrently serving as her transportation secretary.

Healey will also likely elevate the steps the state has taken to counter federal action or inaction, be it moving to protect some residents from hikes in health care premiums or resisting the Trump administration’s requests for data on federal food assistance recipients.

Healey is entering the final year of her first term also in a tenuous fiscal moment. Massachusetts’ high cost of living has shown little signs of abating, with health care and insurance costs rising, housing prices still among the highest in the United States, and utility costs testing household budgets.

With Thursday’s announcement of the $180 million in promised rate reductions, Healey said in a statement that “relief is on the way.” Combined with the deferrals, she said millions of customers’ electric bills would be cut by 25 percent and gas bills by 10 percent during two of the harshest winter months.

“We also know that long term help is needed,” she said. “That’s why we’re going to keep working every day to bring more energy into our state, oppose rate hikes and get charges off of bills.”

The state’s two biggest utilities, Eversource and National Grid, offered similar deferrals last year, when they said they would give customers 10 percent reductions on their bills after regulators told several companies they needed to reduce residential bills for two months during the winter.

However, Eversource, National Grid, and the other three utilities recovered the costs for the discount from customers over the six-month “off-peak” season.

Healey last year filed legislation she said could save residents billions of dollars over the next decade in energy costs. She’s also publicly pressed the state’s utility regulator, whose leaders she appoints, to investigate charges on household bills.

But those aren’t the only challenges facing the state. According to the most recent data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Massachusetts has one of the slowest rates of job growth in the private sector among states. Healey’s office has touted Massachusetts’ lofty rankings among state economies, but the state’s unemployment rates have also ticked up.

If voters’ political decisions still largely revolve around their personal economics — and for many, they still do — Healey’s ability to address that pain will likely dominate her messaging, both on Thursday and beyond.

“That’s why I ran for governor,” Healey said in a video her campaign released Tuesday, “to show up for people who need someone in their corner to lower costs and increase opportunities.”

How Healey does that could become more clear next week. She is slated to release her state budget plan on Wednesday, through which she can propose new policies, begin the conversation on agency budgets, and offer ideas of how to use a raft of surplus tax money generated by the state’s surtax on wealthy residents.

The state collected roughly $3 billion through the so-called millionaires tax last fiscal year, or roughly $1.7 billion beyond what the state had budgeted. Some of the extra money is required to flow into a reserve, but a huge chunk will offer Healey — and lawmakers who ultimately shape the final bill — a significant pot of cash to realize lofty goals or target stubborn problems in education and transportation.

Last year, they dedicated more than a half-billion of those dollars to the MBTA, an agency that Healey has said she “turned . . . around” but still faces deep-seated financial problems. The T this month disclosed that barring another huge infusion of new cash, it faces a massive budget deficit of $560 million.

MBTA general manager Phil Eng get out a shutout in last year’s State of the Commonwealth speech. “In Phil we trust,” Governor Maura Healey said.Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff

Matt Stout can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @mattpstout.