On November 19, 2025, the Town of North Kingstown held a public information session to present the Ocean State Community Electricity program, a municipal electricity aggregation program. Representatives Courtney and Rachel from the town's consultant Good Energy explained the program's structure, supply options, pricing, and enrollment process. The session included extensive public Q&A covering concerns about automatic enrollment, pricing comparisons, renewable energy sourcing, supplier NextEra Energy Services' reputation, and program oversight.
All right. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for being here tonight. My name is Courtney. I'm with Good Energy. My colleague Rachel will be joining us for the QA later in this session. I'm really excited to present to you guys tonight. I'm going to, just so you know what to expect, run through what Ocean State Community Electricity is, how the program works, supply options through the program, as well as how participation works for those who want to participate and those who do not. I would just ask that you hold all your questions until the end. You might find that your questions answered in the presentation, but the bulk of this meeting tonight will be for QA for you to ask your questions. So with that, figured we would start with what the program is. Ocean State Community Electricity is a municipal aggregation program. As mentioned in the introduction, the collective buying power of a town is pooled together and leveraged to select an electricity supplier for the program with more competitive rates as supply options. The purpose of this program is to help North Kingstown residents and businesses manage electricity supply costs and provide options for renewable energy use. The only thing that changes with this program is who your supplier is and therefore what that supply rate is. And truly, truly, when it comes to the purpose of this program, it is just to give you as an electricity consumer more options in terms of what your supply is. While we can't guarantee savings in every rate period, our programs, both in Massachusetts and Rhode Island have historically all saved money over the course of the entire contract. And this is my colleague Rachel. Okay, so we thought we would start with how it works. Basically, the program is being offered to the community via the town's selected consultant, Good Energy. And this program is a part of a buying group that has been operating for three years and includes seven Rhode Island communities. This includes the neighboring South Kingstown and Narragansett. So you're joining this buying group that's been going on for a while, very successfully. The program offers a residential supply rate or supply rate options as well as different rates for commercial and industrial customers. There are three residential supply options in the program, and two of those are cleaner and they also offer lower prices than the utility. The letter that you might have received will have prices on them, and we will run through those prices later in the presentation. So we thought we would introduce our electricity supplier. Next ERA has been chosen as the electricity supplier for the program through that competitive bidding process. Next era is one of the largest wholesale suppliers in the New England area as well as nationally. And next era supply will start through the program in January 2026. And to talk a little bit more about them, there are a lot of electricity suppliers out there. And as always, we're just here to give you more options. You can continue to shop around, whether in this program or outside. Some of these electricity suppliers might have knocked on your door or even called you. And that is why we go with Next ERA, who has the scale and experience to run these types of programs. They are experienced, competent, tested. We've worked with them at least with the last three years in that Rhode Island buying group that you guys are joining, and we have great track records of service in Massachusetts as well. They service the entirety of the Cape. So we're really thrilled to have them on board. There's the delivery side of your electricity bill and the supply side. If you participate, the only thing that changes is the supplier and therefore the supply rate in the supply side of your bill. A lot of our frequently asked questions are addressed on this slide. So in terms of what stays the same, the delivery portion of your Rhode Island Energy bill will remain the same. Rhode Island Energy will continue to deliver electricity, maintain poles and wires, and respond to any storm or power outages. You will still continue to pay just one bill to Rhode Island Energy. Anyone using budget billing or receiving low-income disk rate discounts will continue to receive your current benefits, and the same goes for solar. Customers receiving net metering or other solar benefits will continue to receive those current benefits. And that includes community solar as well. So with that, I'll hand off to Rachel. Good evening, everyone.