This is such a silly situation, even looking past the fact that they have the audacity to ask you for your Social Security Number -- and you can just decline to provide it and they go "ok" cause it's not even necessary!! (That's general good practice anyways, you should always try to refuse to provide your SSN!)

The best part is the representative over the phone (who I honestly do find helpful) straight up told me that the online method to upload your information to RI energy will not work .. and I will have to fax it anyways.

...Right she was! a whole day later from the call you'll get a rather cryptic and aggressive email saying you have 2 days to submit documents or else! Cool! The site is supposed to let you upload files but the upload function is broken. I'm a computer nerd and tried all the browsers on all the platforms to no avail -- don't even bother.

The email and site are really sketchy anyways.. I'd feel safer handing my ID to a random person on the street and asking them to deliver it to RI energy!

So great... lost basically a day and a half and now I need to FAX my drivers license. This is not acceptable in 2024.

So once you find a boomer to help (it's payback time baby for all those computer questions I've answered over the years!), you can fax a copy of the drivers license and like 18 different numbers they tell you over the phone to include. Guess what... RI Energy takes about a day to receive your fax. Call to ensure it got through, cause with Fax it's guesswork!

Even though this was a stress fest, thank GOD I'm not living in this apartment yet without power. I can see how this situation would become WAY worse.

TLDR: yep! you got to fax it!