Nearly 15 million people in New England live within driving distance of America’s biggest natural-gas field, yet heating and electricity prices reached a record for the region this winter. As states stretching from Massachusetts to Maine thaw out from bitter cold, questions linger about why New England hasn’t benefited from the energy boom in the nearby Marcellus Shale. The short answer is not enough pipelines. And the reason is an impasse between pipeline operators and power plants over how to pay for new capacity. The problem is that pipeline operators want long-term contracts in place before they spend the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to build a new pipeline or expand an existing one. But power companies, which buy gas to fuel generators on a need-to-have-it basis, work on a different timetable. Independent power-plant operators must supply electricity to utilities at the lowest cost possible, and utilities are […]