The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission voted Thursday to seek public comment from customers of PPL Electric Utilities about a proposed settlement that was sparked by consumer billing issues that stretched through much of 2023.

The settlement – which was proposed by the PUC’s independent Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement and PPL – includes payment of a $1 million civil penalty and PPL’s agreement to absorb more than $16 million in related costs.

Investigation

In early 2023, the PUC launched a comprehensive investigation into billing issues impacting PPL customers in response to large numbers of consumer calls and complaints about unusually high or low estimated bills, missing monthly bills, and the lack of adequate customer service support resulting in consumers being unable to reach PPL Call Center representatives to discuss their billing concerns.

The matter was referred to I&E – which enforces the Public Utility Code and PUC’s regulations and has the authority to bring enforcement actions before the Commission.

Based on data obtained from PPL during I&E’s investigation, the billing issues originated in December 2022, when PPL discovered that customer meter data was not transferring from the utility’s meter data management software to its customer service system. 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 problems, with some customers receiving incorrect bills while others received no bills, and issues with bill estimation resulting in wildly inaccurate bills.

According to the proposed joint settlement, more than 48,000 PPL accounts received no bills during one or more months between the December 2022 and April 2023 billing periods, and during that same period more than 91,000 unique PPL accounts received no bills.

Additionally, between December 2022 and January 2023 nearly 795,000 estimated bills were issued by PPL, and a total of more than 860,000 estimated bills were issued between December 2022 and May 2023.

An analysis of estimated bills issued by PPL revealed that 67.31% (261,104 customers) of the bills had an estimate differing from the customer’s actual usage of 10 percent or greater. Of these bills, one-third indicated an estimate that varied from actual by more than 25 percent. And nearly 48,000 customer bills were based on an estimate differing from actual usage by more than 50 percent.

Further, over 82,000 estimated bills were impacted by missing or inaccurate supply charges – resulting in a process where PPL canceled the initial estimated bills and rebilled accounts to correct errors – generating consumer confusion and creating a complicated tangle of bills that took months to unravel.

Customers who attempted to contact PPL about billing issues were faced with extremely long wait times or were unable to reach the utility at all. Call center data from the period between January and April 2023 showed that 41 percent of calls to PPL were abandoned without customers being able to reach a representative.

Proposed settlement

Under the terms of the proposed settlement, PPL will pay a $1 million civil penalty, along with undertaking a series of corrective actions in response to these billing issues.

The proposed settlement also notes that PPL has already refunded approximately $1 million to customers who received estimated bills and were overbilled due to the application of the incorrect rates in the bills that addressed the estimated billing periods.

Additionally, PPL has voluntarily agreed to absorb more than $16 million in additional costs related to rectifying their billing issues, including:

• Waiving voluntarily approximately $2.3 million in late payment fees.

• Forgoing recovery of approximately $7.8 million of additional bad debt expense arising out of the voluntary service termination moratorium.

• Forgoing collection of approximately $1.7 million from customers who were underbilled in the estimation true-up process.

• Forgoing recovery of an additional approximately $3.7 million of unplanned costs in engaging external vendors.

• Forgoing recovery of approximately $700,000 of unbudgeted employee overtime expenses.

Full instructions for submitting public comment will be provided when the proposed settlement is published in the Pennsylvania Bulletin. Customers will have 25 days to respond.

The commission will carefully review all comments received before issuing a final decision on this case.

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