PROVIDENCE — A week and a half after ratepayers filled a hearing room at the Public Utilities Commission to express rage and frustration at sky-high electric and natural gas rates, advocates filled the Statehouse on Thursday evening to support a bevy of legislation aimed at lowering energy costs and aimed their criticism at the state’s main utility company.

During a marathon three-and-a-half hour hearing, members of the House Corporations Committee heard repeated stories of residents struggling to keep up with their utility bills, and advocates frustrated by Rhode Island Energy executives, who they allege won’t engage in good faith to reinstate more protections and programs for low-income communities.

Rhode Island Energy (RIE), which counts about 780,000 customers in the state, has repeatedly come under fire in recent years for historic rate hikes that the company has long attributed to increased worldwide demand for natural gas, which is used for home heating and cooking in Rhode Island, as well as generating the electricity sold to the state’s ratepayers.

The utility company has gone on the offense in recent weeks, with RIE president Gregory Cornett telling lawmakers on March 20 the company has limited control over setting the rates and blaming mandated charges from state programs as one of the drivers of the high rates, even though those charges are a small portion of one half of electric bills. Cornett also told lawmakers that despite the high energy costs, Rhode Island’s rates are still closer to the middle of the pack when it comes to cost, with Massachusetts’ three energy companies having much higher rates.

Cornett also noted much of the cost was fueled by a lack of natural gas and a colder-than-average winter.

Sharon Gallop, a Pawtucket resident and volunteer at the nonprofit George Wiley Center, told lawmakers that ratepayers like herself needed more protections during brutal New England winters.

“We have a hardship facing us with the utility crisis, our cost-of-living crisis, and choosing whether we’re going to eat or pay our bills,” Gallop said.

Gloria Szymkowicz-Petroski told lawmakers she was currently unemployed, and despite being willing to work had been unable to find a job for months. The high utility rates of the past three winters had made it especially hard for her to keep up with all her bills and threaten to push her into homelessness, she said.

I’m six months behind on my utility bills and I don’t know how I’m going to pay this month’s rent. I only have two-thirds of it.”

— Gloria Szymkowicz-Petroski

The two pieces of legislation both Szymkowicz-Petroski and Gallop said would help are bills strengthening the serious illness protection program (H5068), known as SIPP, and another restarting the Percentage Income Payment Plan (H5245), known as PIPP.

SIPP would extend the default moratorium for utility shutoffs from three weeks to three months, should a ratepayer be able to get documentation from a doctor that they have a life-threatening illness that would be exacerbated by losing electricity or gas. Advocates have long argued the current length of time for SIPP is too short, especially since the program relies on repeat visits or calls to doctors to get them to sign the paperwork, something which even in the best of times was difficult to do, before the state’s serious shortage of primary care physicians.

PIPP, meanwhile, would create a tiered payment program based on income levels. Qualifying ratepayers would pay a flat percentage of their income instead of the typical utility bill calculated by the usage rate, making utilities more affordable for Rhode Island’s residents most critically in need of support.

The George Wiley Center has lobbied the Legislature to pass both bills for almost a decade, with little success. On Thursday, Cornett said the utility company was “open to a continual dialogue” on the programs.

But George Wiley Center executive director Camilo Viveiros expressed frustration with the company, telling lawmakers the center had been trying to work with RIE for years to pass the programs.

“I find it very performative when they say they don’t oppose these bills and there’s a double standard where they don’t give us feedback on PIPP, they tell legislators to wait until we submit something,” Viveiros said.

More than 48 people signed up to testify on PIPP, SIPP, and 13 other pieces of legislation on Thursday evening. Of the bills put into play by the House committee, legislation for PIPP, SIPP, capping utility profits, and studying publicly owned utilities proved to be the most popular.

The most recent winter season, scheduled to end April 1, was the third winter in a row in which residents across the state faced sky-high energy bills, with little plans for relief in sight.

Residents typically get relief in the summer, when there is less worldwide demand for natural gas, but this summer rates are only going down slightly. The average electric ratepayer is only expected to save around $35 this summer on their electric bills compared to the most recent winter season, a total reduction of around 18%.

The March 10 public hearing on the proposed summer rates likely set a record for the number of attendees. Usually such hearings are dry, quick affairs, and residents tend not to show up at all when the rates are reduced. But this year Rhode Islanders feeling the squeeze on electric and gas bills filled the room, and had to be moved into an overflow room in the Public Utilities Commission building in Warwick.

RIE executives submitted written and oral testimony opposing 10 of the 15 bills under consideration on Thursday, including the SIPP legislation, but notably not the PIPP program legislation.

The company opposed bills that would cap its profits; tie rate increases to the Consumer Price Index; make energy bills more transparent for the ratepayer; and a bill to start a study commission examining public ownership of electric and natural gas utilities.

“To be clear, Rhode Island Energy is not for sale,” Cornett said. “Even if the state could force a takeover of some or all of our assets, it would saddle taxpayers with billions of dollars of generational debt and do nothing to address the underlying drivers of cost.”

Cornett and other RIE executives, which included one vice president from PPL Corp., the Pennsylvania-based parent company of Rhode Island Energy, warned lawmakers that without the expectation of a fair rate of return, investors and their capital would cease flowing to the utility company, which is in the process of upgrading the state’s aging electric infrastructure.

The “4% return on our investment is lower than U.S. government treasury bonds, and those are risk-free,” said Tadd Henninger, senior vice president of finance for PPL Corp. “If we need investor capital, we’re asking them to invest at a rate lower than the U.S. government. We will not attract any more dollars.”

The ultimate result is that electric and natural gas prices would rise, even if lawmakers passed all the bills under consideration.

Emma Arcadia, a pest control technician and shop steward, told lawmakers that public goods like electricity were too important for the public to leave to private entities to neglect.

“I know the difference between public and private roads, and I bet you do too,” Arcadia said. “Private roads usually aren’t great; the public roads are a heck of a lot better a lot of the time. They get repaired more. The private ones? Maybe not so much.”

H5068, H5245, and the 13 other bills were held for further study.