I have mixed feelings about this. IMO, it's complicated.

There's no doubt extra pipeline capacity would have greatly reduced or even prevented much of the electricity price shock we saw this past winter.

OTOH, New England has excess pipeline capacity for all but the 30-40 coldest days of the year. In the past, power generators have done a decent a job of covering the relatively few days of shortfall with oil and LNG imports. (More gas storage and also more hydro from Canada would have greatly strengthened this backup capacity).

So if we had built more pipelines, we'd basically have paid several billion dollars for pipeline capacity that gets utilized about 10% of the time. That's going to result in a permanently higher cost structure for ratepayers that's unlikely to produce enough benefit to offset its cost, especially over the long term.

In the next decade or two, much of New England's heating load is going to move from natural gas to heat pumps and this will result in significantly lower natural gas usage (even once the extra electric demand is considered). This coupled with the crazy amount of offshore wind and battery storage in the connection queue right now makes me think building more pipeline capacity would have provided just a short-term limited benefit. After that, it would have just saddled us with a seriously underutilized and very expensive capital asset to write down.

See page 11 of this report. It documents a dramatic shift away from natural gas for New England over the next decade. IMO, this shift is already well underway and will be very noticeable in the resource mix within the next 3-5 years.

https://www.iso-ne.com/static-assets/documents/2022/06/iso_ne_overview_and_regional_update_cbia_6_2_2022.pdf