Every fall, Rhode Islanders brace for one of two things: a rate increase, or a rate increase dressed up as relief. This year, Rhode Island Energy has filed for the former, and for once, the company isn't saying how big it is.
On July 22, Rhode Island Energy asked the Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission to approve new Last Resort Service rates for the six months running from October 1, 2026, through March 31, 2027, according to the filing in Docket 26-27-EL. The filing includes a motion for protective treatment. In plain English: the number that will decide what most Rhode Islanders pay to heat and power their homes this winter is currently sealed from public view.
Last Resort Service is the default electric supply for anyone who hasn't shopped for a competitive supplier or signed up for a municipal buying program. That's about 77 percent of Rhode Island Energy's roughly 500,000 residential customers — call it 385,000 households running their heat, their stove and their kids' Wi-Fi on whatever rate the PUC signs off on this fall.
How this actually works is worth walking through, because it explains why the company can raise rates and regulators mostly can't stop it. Last Resort Service rates are a straight pass-through: Rhode Island Energy charges customers exactly what it paid for wholesale power, with no markup and no profit baked in. State law requires that. It also means the PUC's job isn't to ask whether a rate is fair to your wallet — it's to ask whether the math is right. PUC Chairman Ronald Gerwatowski put it bluntly at a September 2025 hearing on the prior winter's rates: "We don't have the authority to deny the cost recovery because costs are straining affordability." The commission's question, he said, is simpler than that: "Did they comply with the procurement plan and did they do the rates correctly?"
Last year's version of this same filing shows the pattern in miniature. Rhode Island Energy proposed 14.77 cents per kilowatt-hour for the October 2025 through March 2026 winter — about 16 percent above the prior summer's rate, and roughly $22.28 more a month for a typical customer. The PUC approved it unanimously that September. It was still an improvement: nearly 10 percent below the winter before, and well under the record set during the 2022-2023 heating season when the war in Ukraine sent natural gas markets into a spiral New England still hasn't fully shaken off. RI Energy President Greg Cornett called the direction of prices encouraging at the time, saying forward markets appeared to be "continuing to go down a little bit." Summer 2026 rates, in effect since April 1, dropped to 11.09 cents — the seasonal relief that always precedes the seasonal hike.
That's the cycle the new filing restarts. Whatever number regulators are now reviewing behind the protective order, it will replace 11.09 cents on October 1 and it will almost certainly be higher, because winter supply costs in New England reliably run above summer costs. The open questions are how much higher, and whether it lands closer to last year's 14.77 cents or closer to the 17.7-cent rate customers paid two winters ago.
There is some cushion built into the system already. Rhode Island Energy's parent company, PPL Corporation, committed to returning roughly $150 million in acquisition-related tax savings to customers, and proposed paying that out as monthly bill credits of $20 to $30 for electric customers and $40 to $50 for gas customers each January, February and March — including January through March of 2027, squarely inside the period this filing covers.
Customers who want out of the guessing game entirely have one option available in seven Rhode Island communities — Barrington, Central Falls, Narragansett, Newport, Portsmouth, Providence and South Kingstown — where municipal aggregation programs buy power in bulk through a competitive supplier and have modestly undercut Rhode Island Energy's default rate. For everyone else, the number stays sealed until the PUC finishes its review, sometime before it takes effect on October 1.