BEL Chairman: Heat, Not Smart Meters, Driving High Bill Complaints
Are BEL’s smart meters driving up electricity bills, or are hotter temperatures forcing consumers to use more power? BEL Executive Chairman Lynn Young says the heat is largely responsible for the sharp increases, though he acknowledged some meter accuracy issues are also playing a role.
Young addressed growing questions about the smart meter rollout directly, saying older meters in some cases had simply stopped reading consumption accurately. “We’ve found that we’ve had some complaints with the new meters, but every one we look at, we found those kind of situations. If a meter is not working properly for various reasons, and I’m not accusing anybody of tampering, we found a few where the meter wasn’t reading properly. When you put in the new meters, then you start to get the accurate reading. That is happening. I think over time that will go away as we change out the new meters and people are able to see their accurate consumption and manage it better.”
Young says the number of high bill complaints has been higher than usual, but expects that to ease as cooler weather arrives later in the year. “I’ve had more than usual number of high bill complaints at this period in time. I’m pretty sure that come November, December, we will see those numbers start going down again as the cool weather kicks in and people’s consumption goes down.”
He also pointed to a separate, more mundane cause behind some complaints: payment timing. Customers who pay their bill through the bank just before the due date sometimes see a new bill generated before that payment has fully processed, making it look like their balance doubled. “Somebody, let’s say their bill is due tomorrow, and they pay their bill just before the bill is due. They pay through the bank, the bank takes a few days to process it. But in the meantime, a new bill goes out, and that new bill doesn’t reflect the payment. And so the new bill includes the arrears that the person has already paid for, but it hasn’t passed through the banking system yet. And people say, ‘Oh, my bill doubled.’ We’ve had a couple instances like that, and we point out to people, and they say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s just that the bank payment hadn’t hit our accounts as yet.'”
Young says the spike in complaints comes down to a mix of factors, mainly heat-driven consumption, but also meter accuracy and payment timing issues. “I think it’s primarily driven by the hot temperatures, but the other issues that I just explained also affect it.”
For customers found to have been under-billed due to a faulty meter, Young says BEL offers a payment plan to spread out the catch-up cost over several months rather than demanding it all at once. “When we do have a case where the meter was being under-read and then it gets caught up, we give customers a payment plan where we spread it out over a few months to ease the burden on them to try to catch up on what they might owe.”