THE HOUSE AND SENATE chairs of the Legislature’s energy committee, once so divided that they split the panel in two and held hearings separately, have worked out a truce in a bid to pass climate change and energy legislation this session.

The truce has allowed the House and Senate chairs of the Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy Committee to report 25 bills of their choosing out of the panel to their respective chambers. The expectation is that the two chairs – Rep. Jeffrey Roy of Franklin in the House and Sen. Michael Barrett of Lexington in the Senate – will each shape their packages into an omnibus climate bill that will go through their respective branches and then into a conference committee where the differences between the two branches will be negotiated.

The legislative workaround resolves a particularly nasty fight between the two branches that resulted in an unusual committee standoff, with House members holding hearings separately from Senate members and witnesses forced to testify before both groups.

Barrett opted for the separate hearing approach when Roy indicated he wanted majority rule to dictate when committee hearings and executive sessions would be held and which bills would be reported out. With House members outnumbering Senate members on the committee by almost a 2-1 margin, Barrett feared losing leverage, so the committee split in two. Barrett claimed Roy was violating the rules of the committee.

The impasse was resolved when the two chairs agreed that Senate members voted to release bills filed with the committee to the Senate (with House members abstaining) and House members voted to release bills to the House (with Senate members abstaining).

There’s a long way to go in negotiating a bill both branches can agree on, but both chairs seem fairly optimistic. “For this year, we’ve worked out the parity thing within the committee, which is excellent. That will always be the make or break question,” Barrett said. “On a personal level, Jeff and I are friends, so that’s never the issue.”

Roy said everything is not back to normal. “Some sort of normal is all I can say,” Roy said. “I’m working on some stuff in the House and he’s working on some stuff in the Senate and we’ll come together in the end.”

Both lawmakers share the belief that another climate and energy bill needs to pass this year. Its contents are a bit up in the air, but, judging from the bills the two lawmakers reported out of committee, as well as input from the Healey administration, possible areas of focus are the way transmission infrastructure projects are permitted, utility rates are structured, and offshore wind procured. 

The lawmakers are also reviewing energy storage, advanced electricity meters, building decarbonization, the MassSave energy conservation program, the bottle deposit law, fusion energy, and new rules for municipal aggregation of electricity customers.

Barrett and Roy seem confident that they can get a bill done, but there is one area where they are clearly at odds – what to do with competitive electricity suppliers. Barrett seems inclined to side with Gov. Maura Healey and Attorney General Andrea Campbell on the need to shut down companies marketing electricity directly to consumers because of their predatory practices, but Roy thinks a better approach is putting safeguards in place to clean up the industry.

“I’m not a believer in putting an industry out of business because you’ve got a few bad actors,” Roy said.