BOSTON – The Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities is providing relief for natural gas customers of National Grid who faced skyrocketing costs this winter.
The DPU says National Grid failed to issue bills in a timely manner to tens of thousands of customers “due to a deficiency in its customer billing system related to the crossover from off-peak to peak rates” on November 1st, 2024.
The state says there are several-thousand customers who have not gotten a bill in five-to-six months.
Mass DPU seal
Here are excerpts from a letter the DPU sent to National Grid this week.
Providing customers with accurate, timely, and transparent bills is a fundamental obligation of electric and gas distribution companies. Substantial delays in sending bills deprive customers of the opportunity to adjust their behavior (i.e., energy usage) in response to the distinct price signal produced by the rates and charges set forth in their utility bills.
The importance of these price signals is even greater during times of high energy costs, such as experienced this past winter in the Commonwealth, when consumers’ consumption decisions have a greater impact on their budgets.
More fundamentally, substantial bill delays can wreak havoc with household budgeting, and it is simply unfair to expect customers to pay multiple months’ worth of bills that were not rendered timely.
While the Department’s regulations and precedent make some allowance for unforeseen circumstances, inadvertent mistakes, and technical glitches in the Company’s billing practices, there is a limit on the flexibility afforded for failure to comply with the requirement to render bills in a timely manner… Nothing in our regulations or precedent… permits an extended and unaddressed systemic error of this magnitude.
Apart from the utter failure to perform the routine utility obligation of rendering bills in a timely manner, the Company compounded its lapse by failing to inform the Department in November when it first became aware that the “crossover” process in the Company’s billing system was causing bills to fail to be generated and rendered to its natural gas customers. As a result, the Department’s Consumer Division was fielding hundreds of calls in succeeding months without having the information necessary to respond or to fashion a suitable remedy for the Company’s customers…The Company’s failure to proactively acknowledge the billing issue and work constructively with the Department to craft an appropriate solution is inexcusable.
Massachusetts ratepayers have endured a cold winter marked by high rates and high bills. For a significant number of these ratepayers, these challenges were compounded by the Company’s systemic billing error.
Here is the action the DPU is directing National Grid to take:
For each customer who has not received a bill since the beginning of the peak season, the Company shall waive charges for any usage occurring more than 60 days prior to the date the Company sends the customer its next bill.
For customers who did not receive a bill for more than 60 days, the Company shall either waive collection of amounts owed for usage more than 60 days prior to the date of said bills or, if the customer has already paid, the Company shall credit or refund such sums to each customer.
The Department further directs protections for affected customers for whom even a 60-day back bill would pose a financial burden. When such customers request bill payment assistance from the Company, the Company shall require a down payment of no more than 10 percent of the amount owed and shall permit a payment plan period of at least 9 months.
By Jim McCabe, CapeCod.com NewsCenter
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