TOU bills lack vital piece of information

Toronto Hydro Time-of-Use Billing shifts costs by peak and off-peak hours, uses smart meters and a loss factor adjustment, and removed meter readings from bills, prompting calls for transparency and verification in Ontario.

Toronto Hydro has moved most of its 580,000 residential customers to time-of-use rates. But some say their new bills lack an important piece of information.

Before the switch, Toronto Hydro bills showed the current reading say 3311 and the previous reading say 1649. The difference 1662 was the number of kilowatt hours used during the billing period.

Its new time-of-use bills don’t show the current and previous readings, a change highlighted after a recent billing system failure at Toronto Hydro raised concerns, but only the kilowatt hours used during the period.

As before, the number of kilowatt hours is multiplied by a loss factor adjustment, which accounts for power lost from transmission lines before it gets to your home, and boosts your total usage by 1.0376 per cent.

No longer can customers double-check bills by going to their electricity meters at home and taking a current reading.

“We definitely have those readings. We’re just not presenting them on the bill,” says Karen France, Toronto Hydro’s project leader for the smart meter phase-in at the utility.

“It’s just an oversight. We’re listening to customers who say they need to validate, to take the bill to the meter to verify the reading.”

Newmarket Hydro, which switched to time-of-use rates two years ago, also removed the current and previous meter readings from customers’ bills.

“I used to get calls saying, ‘I used to see the start and finish. Now I no longer see it.’ But I haven’t had such a call in well over a year,” says Larry Herod, director of distribution services for the utility, which has 28,000 household clients.

Under time-of-use rates, you pay more for power used during peak periods and less for power used during off-peak periods, such as weekends and after 9 p.m.

Newmarket Hydro recently released a study of 3,000 residential customers that showed they were responding to time-of-use rates by shifting consumption.

There was no change in the volume of electricity used during the 26-month period, but consumers used less power during the higher-priced periods and more during the off-peak weekends and holidays, a pattern that can create revenue shortfalls for utilities.

“The findings of this study show that TOU is working in Newmarket,” utility president Paul Ferguson said in a news release, adding that people change their perception as time progresses.

The longer they’re on TOU pricing, the less they believe it causes their bills to increase – and the more they believe that the bill savings adequately compensate them for changing their habits.

Still, the federal government wants to go back to showing meter readings on the bill. Toronto Hydro is on a working group with Ontario’s Independent Electricity Operator and Measurement Canada to restore the old ways.

“We expect that a regulation will be in place by 2012 that will facilitate the inclusion of this information across all electrical utilities in Ontario,” says Toronto Hydro spokesman Blair Peberdy.

“The new regulations should increase the transparency around TOU billing even further. Customers should be able to check their bills against the current reading on their meter, especially after a bad meter case in Toronto underscored accuracy worries, and see the difference.”

William Connacher, a Toronto Hydro customer concerned about a possible Toronto Hydro bill increase of 5.5 per cent, wants to know if the working group includes public representation. He thinks it’s unacceptable to make customers wait three to four years to get back meter readings on their bills.

“The last meter reading on my bill was to July 2009,” he says. “How many customers even keep bills going back three years? Expecting customers to accept bills lacking a means of verification, amid concerns about metered service at Toronto Hydro, is not appropriate.”

An 8-per-cent increase in the regulated price of electricity came in this month, even as a minister urged people to blame old meters for high rates across the province. And starting July 1, the harmonized sales tax will add another 8 per cent to the total cost of electricity in Ontario.

With widespread anxiety about rising costs, the Ontario government should plug the leak and quickly restore customers’ right to see meter readings on their bills.

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