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Why did PPL Electric customers pay more this winter?
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Scott LaMar
power cord over us dollar bills
Airdate: March 2, 2023
Many central Pennsylvania homeowners were shocked when they got their electric bills in January. Some electric customers received bills than were higher than expected and in more than few cases — by a lot.
PPL Electric Utilities, which covers most of the region increased its rates in December and prices have nearly doubled in the past two years.
PPL also had an issue with billing in December that had an impact on what many customers were paying.
What’s behind the higher bills and is there anything electric customers can do about it?
On The Spark Thursday, Ryan Hill, Vice President of Corporate Communications with PPL Electric Utilities indicated their default rates increased by 18% December 1, 2022. He said the war in Ukraine is one of the factors that led to the rate hike,”It’s created tighter supplies for natural gas. As Europe tried to wean itself off of natural gas from Russia. Heading into winter there was an effort by the U.S., I think, to ship more liquefied natural gas over to (Europe). To help our allies and boost our stores heading into winter. That’s certainly, again, that war has really kind of disrupted the markets for a number of things. And it’s probably contributed to rising costs of goods and services for many of the things that folks buy.” Natural gas is used for power plants.
Hill also said constraints to power supplies was also a factor.
Hill pointed out that PPL isn’t the supplier of electricity,”I think that’s something that’s not clearly understood still for many of our customers. Our role is simply to deliver power. We don’t operate power plants. We don’t generate and produce that much like FedEx or UPS. That doesn’t make the package you buy. They deliver it. We deliver your electricity. However, if you don’t go out and choose a competitive supplier, which you can, we’re required by law to go out and buy power for you.”
As for the bill problem last December, Hill said,”We’ve got automated meters right now. They collect, they communicate your usage information back to the company that gets stored in one system. We have a billing system that needs to talk to that system then and access that meter data in order to bill our customers. There was a breakdown in that data transfer communication part of the process. Our billing system couldn’t access the meter data and so we had to rely on estimates for close to 800,000 customer bills in December. And so there’s a process that we have estimates are nothing new. You know, if you think back to the days of meter readers that would go to folks house houses, there could be storms, There could be other reasons why we couldn’t get out to a house. And we have to rely on an estimate. The the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission does provide us the opportunity to do that. But how we do that, as we go back and look at your prior month there, prior year, same period prior year, and we use that as the estimate of your use. Of course, there are things that could change from year to year. Your usage could change in your home. The days in the particular billing cycle could be different. You could have an extra five days in a billing cycle this year or last year. And then the weather is of course different. But really, unless you used unless your usage pattern changed dramatically, it should be a reasonably accurate estimate. And if it is are lower or higher by some amount, let’s say it was higher in December by 100 kilowatt hours. The estimate then based on, you know, comparison to your actual usage, when you get that next bill that’s based on actual usage, you you’ve already paid for that 100 kilowatt hour. Your your next bill based on actual usage is going to be reduced by that amount. So at the end of the day, you’re not going to pay for any more or less electricity than you used to.”
