Toronto Hydro's billing system blows a fuse

- Diane Strickland has a pretty good idea what's going to be in her mail these days even before she looks at it: She'll find yet another bill from Toronto Hydro Energy Services Inc.

Strickland has received six bills in the past two weeks from the company, often known as THESI.

"Every time I go to my mailbox, it seems I get another bill," she said in an interview.

The bills she's received over the past two weeks for her Stouffville home total more than $700, and she suspects another bill or two is still in transit.

Strickland doesn't dispute that she used the electricity for which she's being charged, which dates all the way back to Dec. 11. She simply wonders how a company could get so far behind in its billing.

"If it was your business, or my business, would you wait that long to bill customers?" she asked. THESI is owned by Toronto Hydro, which is wholly owned by the City of Toronto.

Strickland signed a fixed price contract with THESI last year, before the provincial government froze prices for householders and small businesses at 4.3 cents a kilowatt hour.

She's on a pre-authorized payment plan for her electricity bills, so she didn't notice immediately when her bills dropped to zero.

When the stream of new bills started arriving, Strickland called THESI to ask what was going on, since no letter of explanation accompanied the flurry of bills. She spoke to a call centre worker.

"He said: `We've had problems with our billing system,'" she said. "Well, no kidding."

"And he said: `You might be receiving some more bills.'"

When the Star called THESI, a customer service representative said the company's billing system had been thrown out of kilter by the province's price freeze. Retailers like THESI had been charging 5.7 to 5.95 cents a kilowatt hour for power, but the province froze the price at 4.3 cents.

Billing systems were changed to reflect the new pricing, but some accounts fell through the cracks.

Stephen Andrews of Toronto Hydro said THESI has 150,000 customers, and the billing problems affect only about 1,500.

Most retailers bill customers through the local utility. THESI billed customers directly to increase brand awareness but it has proved "very, very tricky," Andrews said.

Letters are being sent to customers like Strickland, and some may be allowed to spread catch-up payments over time, he said.

Toronto Hydro's venture into energy retailing hasn't been a happy one. After the price freeze, THESI was forced to lay off staff, including its top executives. It sold off the natural gas retailing business it had set up, and stopped signing up new electricity retail customers.

Toronto Hydro had also invested in companies that acted as a clearing house for transactions in the new electricity market. Those firms have since been sold after ringing up losses totalling $4.3 million in 2001 and 2002.