The staff of Maine’s utilities regulatory commission said on Tuesday that customer complaints of high billsare not the result of a systemic error in Central Maine Power Co.’s metering or billing system but were caused by high energy usage.
The finding, which supports results from an earlier independent auditor’s report, is the biggest milestone to date in the Maine Public Utilities Commission’s investigation into high bill complaints by some CMP ratepayers. The case has spanned more than 18 months and involved thousands of ratepayers, a threatened class action lawsuitand extended investigations by the commission.
The commission staff also based its finding on examinations of bills from Emera Maine covering Greater Bangor and northern Maine. It compared bills from the winter of 2016-17 with the winter of 2017-18. It found the electricity usage for both CMP and Emera customers rose a comparable amount over those two winters.
However, a key part of the case, a separate audit by the Maine public advocate, won’t be filed until this Friday, Sept. 6.
The commission wants to resolve the billing and metering case by the end of this year.
The commission staff’s proposal, made in an official filing called a bench analysis, is part of the regulatory body’s investigation into complaints by consumers that their bills have beenexcessively high.
The complaints have flowed in to CMP, the commission and the public advocate’s office since October 2017, when CMP installed a new billing system. The installation coincided with a strong windstorm that cut power to thousands of customers for up to a week, followed by a cold winter.
To date, no direct connection has been discovered between the high bills and CMP’s metering and billing system, which the company maintains is working correctly.
CMP has said the high bills are related to high consumer energy use. In August it put forth an initiative to create a $6 million fundto help ratepayers with billing complaints and a partnership with Efficiency Maine to help customers reduce energy costs.
Still, the commission and the public advocate received hundreds of filings, mostly consumer complaints, and more than 8,200 members joined a grassroots Facebook group to lament the high bills.
Lauren Loomis, a CMP customer and administrator for the CMP Ratepayers Unite Facebook group, described what she said are system anomalies in57 pages of testimony filed Aug. 30 with the commission. She asked the commission to hire an independent third-party forensic analyst who specializes in smart meters to investigate her findings.
“The company should have been aware of the metering anomalies and should have known the seriousness of not performing the meter firmware upgrades as being harmful to their customers,” she wrote.
The upgrades are one of the problems cited in complaints by some ratepayers.
The commission first hired independent auditing firmLiberty Consulting Group of Pennsylvania to look into the complaints. Its report in December 2018 found that CMP’s metering and billing systems operated correctly, with some minor errors. It attributed the high bills to cold weather, not CMP’s system.
However, the auditors did fault CMP for not handling the transition to its new billing system in October 2017 well enough and causing concern among consumers.
The Office of the Public Advocate beganits auditbecause customer complaints continued. It is looking at accounts with high bills since May 2018, the time after Liberty finished its audit.
A separate case before the commission is examining whether CMP’s allowable profit, which is set by the utilities commission, should be cut because the utility’s service has lagged in recent years.
The rest of the schedule for the billing and metering caseremains the same, with a technical conference Sept. 24-25, hearings Nov. 5-6, an examiner’s report due Dec. 9 and final deliberations Dec. 20.
This story will be updated.
This story appears through a media sharing agreement with Bangor Daily News.
