Important Information About Your Recent Electric Bill

Many of our mem­bers have reached out after receiv­ing unex­pect­ed­ly high bills in Sep­tem­ber. We under­stand the sur­prise — and con­cern — this caused, and we want to offer both an expla­na­tion and assis­tance to any­one impact­ed.

What Hap­pened?

In July, we expe­ri­enced a com­mu­ni­ca­tion issue between our meter­ing and billing sys­tems. While mem­bers’ elec­tric meters con­tin­ued to record usage accu­rate­ly, the data couldn’t be processed cor­rect­ly in our billing sys­tem or app.

To ensure con­ti­nu­ity dur­ing these rare instances, our sys­tem is designed to tem­porar­i­ly esti­mate usage. This safe­guard keeps bills from being inter­rupt­ed. Once the issue is resolved, your account auto­mat­i­cal­ly “trues up” — mean­ing it adjusts to reflect your actu­al ener­gy use dur­ing the affect­ed peri­od.

Here’s Where Things Went Wrong

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the esti­mat­ed usage dur­ing this time was sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er than your actu­al usage dur­ing a very hot sum­mer month. As a result:

• Your pre­vi­ous bill may have appeared low­er than usu­al, espe­cial­ly for a sum­mer month.
• Some Advance Pay mem­bers even received unex­pect­ed cred­its based on those esti­mates.
• Mean­while, your meter was still record­ing your actu­al (and high­er) usage — par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing August, which saw some of the year’s hottest tem­per­a­tures.

When the com­mu­ni­ca­tion issue was resolved in August, the sys­tem rec­on­ciled the data — and your actu­al usage was applied to your account. That dif­fer­ence showed up on your most recent Sep­tem­ber bill for August usage, mak­ing it much high­er than expect­ed.

We Were Caught Off Guard, Too

While we had antic­i­pat­ed that Advance Pay mem­bers might notice dis­crep­an­cies and sent them tar­get­ed mes­sages, we did not real­ize how sig­nif­i­cant­ly month­ly bills would be affect­ed. In hind­sight, we should have noti­fied all mem­bers. For that, we sin­cere­ly apol­o­gize.

Clear and time­ly com­mu­ni­ca­tion is some­thing our mem­bers have come to expect from us — and right­ful­ly so. In this case, we fell short. We’re sor­ry for the con­fu­sion, the frus­tra­tion and the finan­cial strain this may have caused.

We’re Here to Help

We know these high­er bills have put an unex­pect­ed bur­den on many of our mem­bers. If you need assis­tance or would like to dis­cuss pay­ment arrange­ments, please don’t hes­i­tate to call us. Our team is here and ready to help, even if phone lines are cur­rent­ly busier than usu­al.

What’s Next

The com­mu­ni­ca­tion issue between our meter­ing and billing sys­tems is now fixed. Your most recent bill includes your actu­al usage from August and the miss­ing por­tion of July’s usage.

This sit­u­a­tion was unlike any­thing we’ve expe­ri­enced before, and we’ve learned a great deal from it. We’re already work­ing on improve­ments to our sys­tems and inter­nal process­es to help pre­vent sim­i­lar issues in the future — and to ensure bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tion if chal­lenges arise again.

Thank you to every­one who reached out with ques­tions and con­cerns. We exist to serve you, our mem­bers — and we remain com­mit­ted to doing so with the hon­esty, trans­paren­cy and care you deserve.