HARRISBURG — PPL Electric Utilities stands to lose an estimated $16.2 million as part of a proposed settlement agreement with the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission concerning botched customer billing last winter.
In addition to the lost revenue and related costs to resolve billing issues for tens of thousands of customers, PPL Electric agreed to pay a $1 million civil penalty as part of the proposed settlement.
The settlement is proposed by PPL Electric and by PA PUC’s independent Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement. PUC commissioners must formally approve the terms to become official.
As part of the proposed settlement, PPL agreed voluntarily to absorb $16.2 million in costs it incurred through the ordeal and won’t seek to recover the funds in future rate cases or related manners: $2.3 million in voluntarily waived late fees; $7.8 million of bad debt from not terminating service; forgoing the collection of $1.7 million from customers who were under-billed through estimates; $3.7 million of unplanned costs in engaging external vendors; $700,000 of unbudgeted employee overtime expenses.
About $1 million was refunded to customers whose accounts were overcharged, settlement documents show.
Issues began to arise in December 2022 when, according to settlement documents, data from customers’ electric meters failed to transfer from the utility’s management software to its customer service system.
An investigation by PA PUC’s independent Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement found more than 48,000 PPL accounts weren’t billed for at least one month between December 2022 and April 2023.
“The inability to transfer actual meter data backed up normal customer billing operations and resulted in sending estimated December 2022 bills. Later, human error caused additional incorrect bills to be issued, while some customers received no bills, and issues with bill estimation resulted in wildly inaccurate bills,” according to a statement from PUC.
Nearly 795,000 estimated bills from PPL Electric were sent to customers inside of a short window: Dec. 20, 2022, to Jan. 9, 2023. In all, more than 860,000 estimated bills were sent to customers across more than four months.
The Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement found that many were “unusually high or low” and had missing or incomplete supplier charges.
Nearly 48,000 of the estimated bills were off by more than 50% compared to actual usage, the investigation found. Many others were off from 10% to 25% or greater.
The billing errors caused mass concern among PPL Electric customers and the utility’s call center couldn’t handle the incoming calls.
According to the investigation, PPL’s call center received more than 217,500 calls in January 2023 alone, far exceeding the previous year’s monthly average of about 165,000 calls. Of those January calls, customers reported unusually long wait times. The investigation found that 41% of the calls, or nearly 90,000, were abandoned. The utility’s rate of abandoned calls across the prior year was about 20%.
PPL Electric didn’t terminate service for any customers for nonpayment from January through June, according to the Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement. The utility company voluntarily waived late payment fees for January and February and authorized significant overtime to correct the issues for customers.
Bureau investigators said the errors weren’t the result of a crime, rather, a technical mistake with the utility’s billing system. PPL Electric’s conduct wasn’t intentional or negligent, the company cooperated with the investigation and it worked to correct the issues with customers and within its own operations, investigators said in settlement documents.