IN THE THROES of what would become Massachusetts’s coldest winter in a decade and looking for a tangible win at the beginning of a reelection year, Gov. Maura Healey announced a plan in her State of the Commonwealth address this past January to provide relief to residents struggling to pay their high energy bills.

Healey’s pitch was to offer modest but concrete savings during February and March, using $180 million in state dollars to cover 15 percent of residents’ electricity costs. The utilities during those months would defer an additional 10 percent of electric bills and 10 percent of gas bills to be collected throughout the rest of the year.

The plan required buy-in from the state’s utilities, which submitted filings with state regulators to carry it out.

Yet what was supposed to be a good-hearted attempt to help customers burdened by high energy costs quickly devolved into a back-and-forth when the utilities made clear that they planned to collect interest on the deferred charges.

Six days following her annual speech, after she “reached out to” the companies to rectify the issue, Healey declared victory when her office fired off a press release hailing the decision from the companies to drop their effort in acquiescence to the governor’s “demand.”

The whole episode – ultimately over not all that much money – was a crash course in today’s energy politics in Massachusetts. And the dust-up offered a preview of the larger tensions now playing out between a governor presiding over a state with electric rates at double the national average and the utility companies charged with maintaining safe and reliable systems that need to handle more power to meet rising demand and climate targets while, of course, making money.

“I want to be clear: When it comes to utility companies, we’ve got to end business as usual,” Healey said at a rare quickly assembled press conference on July 31, just as the legislative session was ending, where she used her bully pulpit to lambast the state’s energy providers. “Utility companies are seeking rate hikes and excessive profits, while people and businesses are struggling to pay their bills.”

For all the genuine frustration with the state’s electric and gas companies, which reward their executives with generous pay packages, challenge efforts from regulators to squeeze their profits, and don’t do enough in advocates’ eyes to wind down the gas system to decarbonize, the Healey administration also needs them to advance its priorities.

The utilities administer the Mass Save energy efficiency program, handle interconnection of solar projects, and agreed to Healey’s winter relief initiative.

It means that Healey can cast the companies as a critical partner when it’s advantageous for her to do so — or turn them into a political punching bag and convenient foil when it benefits her.

“If you’re running for office, this is not bumper sticker stuff,” said Ann Berwick, a former chair of the Department of Public Utilities, which regulates the utilities. “You can’t condense the cost of energy and who’s to blame very well.”

It’s not hard for Healey to point the finger at the utilities for the state’s high energy costs as she seeks reelection amid an affordability crisis. The companies’ names are, after all, on the energy bills that customers receive — and a top priority is to deliver returns to their investors.

Yet the browbeating from the corner office is both exposing heightened tensions and masking underlying tradeoffs in the relationship between the utilities and the Healey administration.

While rate increases and other critical policy decisions are made by the Department of Public Utilities — whose commissioners are appointed by the governor — the utilities are large, regulated monopolies that wield significant influence over the energy distribution and transmission infrastructure that gets built. And virtually everyone agrees that the utilities will need to deploy capital and make large investments in new or upgraded poles and wires to deliver more electricity and have more of it come from clean sources.

“It is hard to make significant change in energy policy in Massachusetts without going through the utilities,” said Kevin Conroy, partner at the Foley Hoag law firm and a former state deputy attorney general. “If you want to have an offshore wind facility, you need the utilities to buy the power from that facility. If you want to have a battery storage facility, you need the utilities to buy the electricity from that facility. If you want to have a large transmission line, you need the utilities to be part of that. And the utilities are going to use every chance that they get in Massachusetts to push for benefits for themselves and their shareholders.”

The conflict comes as rising power demand, high energy costs and looming climate commitments to cut pollution in half by 2030 compared to 1990 levels are all converging – and as President Trump’s administration has canceled the permits for offshore wind projects that the state had been counting on.

Both sides have compelling reasons to believe they have the upper hand.

For Healey, public sentiment around the crushing costs of energy in Massachusetts is driving a push on Beacon Hill to lower customer bills and crack down on the utilities’ profits through a sprawling legislative package under debate that has the energy companies playing defense. And ultimately, the DPU has to approve any rate increases, the companies’ return on equity for their shareholders, and gas infrastructure spending that has come under particular scrutiny.

While the utilities can argue that they are being forced to pick up certain costs and that war in the Middle East has strained global energy supply, Healey’s message resonates politically, said George Bachrach, the former head of the Environmental League of Massachusetts and a former Democratic state senator.

“To the degree she’s getting tougher with utilities, from a political standpoint, is only good for her,” he said. “Their interests do not align with everyday residents of the Commonwealth. And to the degree that she needs utilities to get certain things done pales in comparison to what the utilities need her for in terms of future rate-setting.”

William Hinkle, a spokesperson for Eversource, said in a statement that New England has long faced some of the nation’s highest energy costs — and that only a “constructive, honest dialogue” will solve the energy affordability challenge.

“We understand the nature of election season and that attacking utilities may make for effective politics, but utilities like Eversource have absolutely no control over more than half of customer bills and solely scapegoating utilities will not do anything productive to help improve energy affordability,” Hinkle said.

The utilities, for their part, pin blame on state policies that in some cases add costs to energy bills for customers to accelerate decarbonization. That includes Mass Save, which is funded by ratepayers and administered by the utilities. The program provides home weatherization services and heat pumps at reduced cost and now faces backlash on Beacon Hill.

And in new public comments filed last month, Eversource and National Grid are warning state environmental regulators for the first time about cost increases for customers tied to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a collaborative among Northeastern states to cap power sector emissions.

Eversource wrote that the 20-year-old landmark program has “failed to fully achieve” its goals and that without a significant makeover, RGGI will “result in exorbitant costs with little benefits” — and could “undermine public confidence in climate policies more generally.”

That’s another data point in what some feel is the utilities’ quick trigger to point to public policies like RGGI and Mass Save that can increase residential energy bills but aim to provide wider societal benefits, rather than the larger distribution and transmission parts of the bill, which are in the utility’s control.

Those costs have shot up in some cases as much as 40 percent since 2023, according to utility filings, though some of the increase can be explained by higher labor and material costs.

“What we are seeing emerge is a pattern of blaming everything but the real cause of rising costs, which are significant increases on transmission and distribution,” said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director at environmental nonprofit Acadia Center. “However, the utilities aren’t speaking about reining in spending there, and I don’t think it’s a leap to say that’s where they make the majority of their profits. So, of course, they are going to want to rein in costs on things that don’t make them as much money.”

At the same time, state officials are looking to fundamentally change the incentives for utilities, said Christophe Courchesne, who served as deputy chief of the energy and environment bureau of the state’s attorney general’s office under then-AG Healey and is now an associate professor of law at Vermont Law and Graduate School.

As Massachusetts seeks to spur investments in new areas like electrification, geothermal energy, and energy efficiency and stop investments in existing systems like the natural gas network, the more friction there will be, he said.

Case in point: The state’s six gas companies are suing the DPU over the agency’s decision to reduce the amount of money they can collect on an accelerated timeline for gas pipe repair and replacement work.

And Attorney General Andrea Campbell has accused them of slow-walking a transition off natural gas, which is used for heating and cooking in homes and buildings, raising the prospect of issuing penalties for a failure to comply with state climate commitments.

“In many states around the country where states are aggressive and are seeking new changes to the status quo of doing business, that will result in heightened conflict,” Courchesne said. “And when the conflict gets heightened, both sides take to the court of public opinion to define the issues.”

There’s no need to look far for an example of what could come of a relationship between state government and utilities that deeply sours.

Connecticut’s top utility regulator resigned last year after energy companies there, including Eversource, leveled explosive charges that she was secretly issuing orders coming from one single commissioner, who took a particularly aggressive posture toward utilities, under the guise of the entire agency.

To be sure, no one is making any allegations here remotely similar to the scandal that rattled Hartford.

But some see it as an instructive example of what happens when things go sideways — and how hard the utilities will push when they feel their regulators are going too far in targeting their bottom line.

“A lot of tension brings out these kinds of things,” Bill Akley, a former president of gas operations at Eversource who now serves on the board of HEET, said of the showdown in Connecticut.

For Healey, she’s no stranger to dealing with the utilities – and her background offers one explanation for her willingness to criticize them so harshly.

She spent eight years as the state’s ratepayer advocate — a title bestowed upon the Massachusetts attorney general — giving her an intimate familiarity with the kinds of rate battles that serve as a hotbed for debate between state officials and the companies. The attorney general’s office intervenes in practically every proceeding at the DPU.

She served in that role during the 2018 Columbia Gas explosion, negotiating a $56 million settlement that kicked the company out of the state, while also siding with National Grid’s union during a major labor dispute the same year.

In that role, Healey was “always in a position to push hard” and was the “voice of the strongest opposition around any aspect of rate increases,” Akley said.

That viewpoint doesn’t just disappear just because she now occupies the governor’s seat.

Jacqui Manning, a spokesperson for Healey, said in a statement that the governor has “never backed down from standing up to the utilities to protect the people of Massachusetts from higher bills.”

“There is real urgency in changing the way the utilities do business, and the governor is going to continue holding them accountable, working to lower bills and advocating for the passage of energy affordability legislation,” she said.

But there are some signs of synergy between Healey’s administration and the utilities, including a recent agreement greenlit by the DPU between state officials, developers, and utilities to shield solar customers from price spikes.

The irony is that Healey’s antidote to the larger problem of high energy prices is one that the utilities have gotten behind: her push for “all-of-the-above” energy sources, including fossil fuels like gas and oil in addition to renewables, nuclear, and hydro.

But as cost concerns continue to mount in an election year and legal, regulatory, and legislative battles unfold, the stakes rise, too.

“There’s this fine zone between partnership and appropriate strict oversight, and we are definitely leaning now more toward the strict oversight side than the partnership,” said Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association. “Whether we have now exceeded that zone altogether, I don’t know, but we are heading in that direction.”