LOIS HENRY: Spinning SmartMeters: PG&E's story continues to evolve
| Tuesday, Apr 27 2010 06:58 PM
Last Updated Thursday, Jun 10 2010 01:53 PM
It appears PG&E's absurdly (and getting more absurd by the day) UNsmart meter program is like an onion -- lots of stinky layers.
The giant state-sanctioned monopoly has now admitted that, yes, it's had a few problems with the new meters.
Even -- cough -- accuracy -- cough -- problems with a very, very few smart meters that improperly measured customers' usage.
But the problems are infinitesimally small compared to the overall number of meters, local PG&E spokesman Denny Boyles told me. More than 99 percent of the meters work just fine, he said.
Of the overall 5.5 million gas and electric meters installed so far, 23,000 were improperly installed, 11,000 have had data storage issues and 9,000 weren't communicating properly, he said.
All of which they do not see as meter accuracy problems, Boyles told me.
PG&E Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer, Helen Burt told State Sen. Dean Florez the same thing at a hearing Monday.
Oh hogwash.
If the system isn't storing, transmitting, communicating or billing customers properly and they are getting inaccurate bills, that's an accuracy problem.
More important, the numbers Burt and Boyles gave don't add up according to the utility's own reports filed with the California Public Utilities Commission.
Florez' office got ahold of the semi-annual reports and passed them on to me.
In their most recent report, PG&E shows a .34 percent failure rate of approximately 1 million new electric meters installed and activated between January 2007 and January 2010. That's 7,840 meters.
In the hearing, though, Burt said the company had found only 8 of the 5.5 million gas and electric smart meters that had measured improperly.
She insisted the larger number in the report reflected other problems like communication, data storage, etc. Not meter accuracy.
Florez also pointed out the report shows a billing data collection failure rate of 1.14 percent, or 12,369 meters. Bills in those cases had to be estimated, according to the report.
Burt said "failure rate" refers to the number of "pings" the billing system generates because of lack of communication from the meter. It doesn't mean that many bills had been estimated, she said.
PG&E's own definition in the report, however, is that these were accounts where not enough data was collected to generate a non-estimated bill.
Florez had Burt read the definition from the company's own report.
Her response: The definition needs to be changed.
Ummmm.
Yeah, lady, that's what we should do, change the rules to suit PG&E's latest crapola story.
Oh, and the PUC was no better.
Under questioning, Executive Director Paul Clanon said the PUC doesn't oversee how the utilities operate their smart meter programs.
They just react to complaints. They are "complaint driven," he said.
They've received about 1,000 smart meter complaints. About 99 percent of those are from PG&E customers.
So how many complaints have the utilities received directly, Florez wanted to know?
He couldn't say. The PUC doesn't make the utilities report those numbers.
Of course not. If you're a complaint-driven organization, why would you want to know how many complaints are actually out there? Oy!
Meanwhile, Boyles did not dispute that many customers in Bakersfield had (and still do) received estimated bills because of smart meter communication problems. This affects both the old and new smarties, by the way.
He insisted, however, that the whopper bills seen by so many locals last summer were due to hotter days and higher rates, not smart meters.
Here's the thing, though, about those estimated bills.
When the smart meter goes into estimation mode it relies on past usage, which most likely came from the old analog meters. Those meters often recorded lower-than-actual usage as they aged.
So, I wondered, if PG&E went out to the miscommunicating smart meters, found that the customer hadn't been charged for actual usage over a few months, did they tack that all onto the next billing cycle?
A sort of "catch up" bill?
Boyles said no.
"If we underestimated the usage, we're not going to put it all on one bill and say pay it," he said. "If we estimated for three months, we're going to give you three months to pay."
Right. And until recently, PG&E swore up and down there were no problems at all with the smart meters. None!
Something tells me there are a lot more stinky layers yet to come.
Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com
