IN FIVE OR SO YEARS, many of you will drive a car that you plug in at night rather than fill at the pump. You’ll keep your homes warm with electric heat pumps instead of oil or gas furnaces. In ten years, most of you will.  In fifteen years, almost everyone will.

That means that most of the things you rely on in your daily lives – lights, phones, computers, refrigeration, clothes washing, home heating and cooling, the cars you drive – will all run on electricity.

Increasingly, electricity will come from solar panels on your roof, hydropower from Canada, and large solar and wind farms on land and off shore. This is not aspirational. This is state law – law that stems from the realization of Massachusetts’ policy makers that this is the surest, lowest-cost way to address the climate crisis.

Climate-related events are already showing up in the daily news with shocking ferocity: unusual heat waves, extreme ice and wind storms, river flooding, wildfires and deadly levels of smoke. Massachusetts may not experience every type of climate impact, but no place is untouched, and these impacts are increasingly traumatic and costly.

Over the past 15 years, our legislators and governors have adopted an aggressive set of policies to eliminate climate-related emissions from the state’s economy by mid-century. Gov. Maura Healey has assembled leaders in key agencies to implement an “all-hands-on-deck” approach to strengthen the state’s progress on climate action.

Five, ten, or fifteen years may seem like a long time from now, but it is not. By 2030, climate-related emissions across the state need to be down by 50 percent relative to 1990. That’s only seven years away. This will require rapid changes in the state’s aging energy infrastructure. The pace of change we need is unmatched in any period of our history. It will require risk taking by industry and aggressive action by many state agencies in the face of significant technological and economic uncertainties.

Nowhere is this more relevant or more important than in the electric sector.

The power grid – the large transmission towers you see from your car and the smaller wires that hang from brown poles in your neighborhood – is the conductor of the symphony of electricity supply and demand. Without the grid, you can forget about cold beer, lights, phone charging, and everything else. And now it is the most important piece of the climate solution puzzle. The grid needs to absorb and distribute highly variable electricity supply from wind and solar power, while deftly managing rapidly changing customer demands from regular electrical appliances as well as electric vehicles, heat pumps, and rooftop solar and battery storage equipment.

Electricity will increasingly serve as the primary source of energy for the entire economy, and the power grid has become a critical agent of climate policy.

This requires reinforcing and building out the local distribution system and interstate transmission network in a hurry, involving significant – and largely private – capital investment to expand the capabilities and resilience of today’s electric grid. The grid needs investment to reliably handle rapidly changing two-way power flows. Grid operators will need better visibility into power flows to assure delivery of power around the clock.

Planning for and investing in the grid needs to be much more anticipatory than in the past. Ensuring in advance that the grid can handle new connections and demand patterns will give potential electric technology investors the confidence to proceed.

The state’s analyses of the costs to make the necessary grid investment generally indicate even with new investment in the grid, households’ total spending on energy – which today includes large expenditures for fuel (gasoline for cars, oil and gas for heating) – would increase quite modestly. Any evaluation of the total cost impact of Massachusetts’s decarbonization goals must account for both the increase in costs associated with electric-sector investments and the decrease in costs associated with natural gas and petroleum. For example, consumers in the state spent $15.0 billion on natural gas and petroleum for heating and for transportation in 2020$. Fossil fuel expenditures would be greatly eliminated by 2050 under all decarbonization scenarios.

Utility regulators in Massachusetts will play a central role, either enabling or slowing the grid investments needed to achieve the Commonwealth’s climate targets. They will need to continue sensible rate policies, while evaluating utility grid investment decisions within the framework of the state’s climate policy imperatives and through the broader lens of consumer total energy costs.

Massachusetts regulators have adopted innovative regulatory approaches in the past. Much more creative ratemaking innovation is needed to ensure sufficient distribution capacity is built out proactively to meet the decarbonization targets in state law. It needs to support investment while ensuring that all consumers can have access to the vital electricity services they require.

Susan Tierney is a senior advisor at Analysis Group, was formerly assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Energy, and in Massachusetts was the secretary of environmental affairs and commissioner of the Department of Public Utilities. Paul Hibbard is a principal at Analysis Group and formerly chair of the DPU.