Pepco is demanding that D.C.’s utility consumer advocate put up or shut up about claims that large numbers of the power provider’s meters are faulty and might have been responsible for skyrocketing winter electricity bills.
Allegations of busted equipment are “grossly inaccurate and misleading to Pepco customers,” Deborah Royster, Pepco’s deputy general counsel, wrote Wednesday to D.C. People’s Counsel Elizabeth Noel, who represents residential utility customers before the Public Service Commission.
Noel’s office launched an investigation after it was inundated with complaints of wildly high winter electric bills. Its analysis, according to a July 9 report, indicated that 70 percent of the high bills were the result of recorded increases in consumption, but as much as 43 percent of the recorded consumption may have been caused by faulty meters.
The Examiner reported on OPC’s claims Monday.
Pepco has long contended that the high bills, some that doubled or tripled over the previous year, were caused by longer billing cycles, a colder winter, and an increase in electricity generation rates. Pepco on Wednesday filed a formal data request with the Public Service Commission, seeking statistics to back up OPC’s claims.
The city’s leading power provider has 220,000 residential customers, most of whom have the option of switching to another utility.
“She’s doing a big disservice to her constituents, who are our customers,” Robert Dobkin, Pepco spokesman, said of Noel. “It’s too important for us to ignore.” Through a spokesman, Noel would only say that she received Pepco’s request and will respond to it within 21 days.
Pepco has performed 23,330 sample meter tests since 2003 and found only 106 “out of tolerance,” for an accuracy rate of 99.55 percent, Royster said.
“Notwithstanding these statistics that have been reported by Pepco with the Commission, the Office of the People’s Counsel has chosen to ignore the facts and has, instead, elected to make — without a shred of evidence — wholly unsubstantiated allegations in its report to the Commission,” she wrote.
The OPC used customer questionnaires, Pepco’s own data and a consultant’s analysis to reach its conclusions. It did not, however, perform any meter tests.
Karl Pavlovic, an OPC consultant, found “no discernible pattern in the high meter readings.” So the most likely explanations for the high bills, he said, “are an increase in the consumption pattern, random faulty meters, or random meter reading errors.”
