BEL Points to Meter Readings and Payment Delays for Bill Spikes

One of the most heated topics among consumers and business owners across Belize is the recent surge in electricity bills, with many reporting that their monthly statements have doubled or even tripled. During last night’s Energy Business Mixer, BEL General Manager Sean Fuller directly addressed public frustration over these spikes. Here’s how Fuller clarified how these dramatic increases stem from two main operational factors. 

 

Sean Fuller, General Manager, Finance & Business Support, BEL

“So there’s a set of customers complaining that their bills have doubled, some say tripled, and some say they have seen quadruple bills. And every single case that we looked at, every single one, and most of that comes from the Independence service area. What transpired for two or three months, I believe, is that we were estimating the customers’ meters because we had some contractual issues with the meter reader, the guys that actually visited the meters. And so we did in-office estimation of those meters. When we actually went out and started putting in the AMI meters for these customers and got the actual reading, not the estimated readings, you saw some customer bills spike because we caught up on the readings that we estimated that weren’t accurate. So if your average consumption was actually 100 kilowatt-hours, and our estimate for some reason was 80 kilowatt-hours for four months, that’s 80 kilowatts we did not bill you. And so when you get a subsequent month, you get a bill for 180 kilowatt-hours, when in fact it was only 100 that you consumed that month. We made up for the other four months. But in addition to that, at least one of the banks, I understand, the time it takes between when you actually pay your bill online and when it reaches your account can be two to three days, maybe even more sometimes. If during a period that you pay that it has not reached your account, you run your new bill, because you typically pay when the bill is due, right around when you run your new bill, it will show up as an amount past due and the current bill, totaling the sum of the two of them. And customers, when you see the bills, you just look at that bottom figure, and you say, ‘Oh, I owe $400 when my bill is normally $200 a month’. But if you look at the details, $200 is past due, and $200 is this month, but the past due has been paid, it just hasn’t reached your account as yet, because you paid through one of the banks and they had some system issues there.”

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

Watch the full newscast here: