## Skiving customers through incompetency Russell Degnan

I got my latest electricity bill today: -$125,42 Normally finding out you paid for your electricity some months ago would be a good thing, but there is something just a little suss about this one. You see, this is the third time they've significantly over-charged me. Becuase the bill is monthly, and the reading quarterly, the company does a projection of the previous bills to fill the gaps. Shouldn't be too hard, adjust a little for summer/winter changes - we don't have air-conditioning so we use a lot more in winter - and after three months you tack a dollar or two in either direction. But for some reason their formula is consistently way off, so I am consistently over-charged for two months, then paying nothing for a third. Which would be fine, cash flow issues aside, except in the process they are fiddling the numbers in their favour. Because, when I get over-charged, I pay at the bad-person, not-very-energy-efficient rate of$0.1674 per kWh. But when I get refunded, they do it at the good-person, not-using-much-energy base rate of $0.1567 per kWh. 812 kWh x (0.1674-0.1567) =$8.69.

Okay, it's only $9. And it is hardly worth complaining about a measly$9 twice a year (or blogging about for that matter). But if they do that to several hundred thousand customers that starts to add up, notwithstanding the fact that it might represent as much as a third of the yearly profit margin for a retail electricity company.

There is something objectionable about a company producing a model of electricity use so badly wrought that every 6th electricity bill is free into a handy profit. Not that they're the only group of people to turn poor models into a handy profit of late. Seems profiting off bad models is some sort of trend.

Passing Fancy 30th March, 2009 14:45:11   [#]

You are correct and they are evil.

Origin energy owned by Singapore,
TRU is Texas Utilities and we know where that is.

Dont get us started on Tefka
(thats the name for a Kafkaesque phone company)
ann oDyne  16th April, 2009 22:00:20

Marshall stacks
MelBloggers
copperwitch.blogspot and governor_general.blogspot
are both posting on Kafka-esque dialogues with AGL
F.G. Marshall-Stacks  1st May, 2009 19:12:10