Rhode Island’s Office of Energy Resources (OER) has scheduled a hearing on “preventing outages and enhancing the resilience of the electric grid” for Monday, February 20, from noon to 1pm.

February 20th is President’s Day, a Federal and State holiday.

Aside from an 8am parole board meeting, OER is the only state agency meeting on the holiday. In general, holding meetings and hearings on holidays is a way of keeping public participation low.

At the hearing, OER is considering the allocation of federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act money to:

• Demonstrate measurable improvements in energy resilience to all hazards in the United States, and mitigate climate-related risk.
• Ensuring that AT LEAST 40% of the resulting benefits from 40101(d) investments are delivered to Disadvantaged Communities.
• Invest in modernized grid infrastructure that can enable consumer access to lower-cost energy and accommodate increased. electrification, increased penetrations of variable renewable electricity and distributed energy resources, and other evolving system needs over the coming decades.
• Invest in decarbonization solutions that help Rhode Island achieve its ambitious goals of 100% Renewable Electricity by 2033 and net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy-wide by 2050.

Though not technically a violation of the Open Meetings Act, OER, say some stakeholders, has a history of designing meetings and schedules in ways that make it difficult for public participation. Uprise RI will be at this hearing.