Bakersfield.com: Kern County news, events, classifieds, shopping, & search

LOIS HENRY: With friends like PG&E who needs enemies?

BY LOIS HENRY, Californian columnist
lhenry@bakersfield.com | Saturday, Sep 04 2010 12:00 PM

Last Updated Saturday, Sep 04 2010 12:00 PM

PG&E wants to be friends.

Really, it said so.

It has vowed to "rebuild trust" with customers. (As an aside, I'm not sure how you REbuild something you never built in the first place but, by all means, show us what you got.)

Anyhoo, this trust thing comes after a series of debacles including outrageous rate hikes, SmartMeter foul ups and, of course, PG&E's unbelievably cynical attempt via Proposition 16 to take away our right to create our own municipal utilities under the guise of "protecting" us from greedy government.

As part of this trust mission, PG&E executives have embarked on a "listening tour" up and down the state and the giant utility sent representatives to meet with us at The Californian earlier this week.

Among the many things they said, I picked up on a couple gems and you'll see why in a minute.

First, Bill Devereaux, senior director of the SmartMeter project, said PG&E has upgraded its website where customers were supposed to be able to see their actual power usage on a daily basis.

This is all part of the "smart grid" concept that holds customers will be better able to conserve power if they know exactly how much they're using and how much that usage is costing.

Instead, the website has become one of the SmartMeter's more infamous "oopsies" after PG&E was forced to admit communication problems with the meters meant that some of the usage listed on the website was real and some was estimated.

OK, that was then and now PG&E says the site has been upgraded so now it's working.

Not great, according to a retired nurse (who didn't want her name used for fear of PG&E reprisal).

This retired nurse has kept meticulous track of her usage, power costs, how much power is allotted to which rate tier and each month's billing cycle for more than 20 years.

And she's an avid web user. She was worried about going into the dreaded upper tiers late last month and so pulled up her account to see what her usage was.

Instead of the bar graph, she got a page with a note that said: "No meter readings are available. New usage data will be available after you receive your next bill."

She's continued to pull up the page as August turned to September and continues to get the same message.

"How on earth is a person supposed to know when they're getting into the upper tiers?" she asked.

The utility has instituted an "alert" system that customers can sign up for where PG&E will send and e-mail or text message you when you're close to jumping tiers, which is cool.

But if it can do that, why can't it put it on its website for us to check ourselves?

Also at the "let's be friends" meeting this week, PG&E Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer Helen Burt agreed that the phenomenon of customers getting no bills for months on end was serious and it had developed a system to flag such delayed bills so the company could send someone to physically look at the meter, discern the problem and fix it, pronto.

Yeah.

If you recall, this has been an ongoing problem in Bakersfield, which PG&E initially said last February had nothing to do with SmartMeters. Then in May, the utility belched out a big mea culpa in which it said that, yes, it had been having communication problems with the SmartMeters that had resulted in delayed bills.

OK, so that's all water under the bridge, according to the reps who met with The Californian Wednesday.

Sigh.

As luck would have it, Cindy Connally had called me just a few days prior to the "let's be friends" meeting in sheer frustration over a second round of delayed billing from PG&E.

Last fall, she went three months without a bill, finally getting a whopper during winter. She called and called and tried to get PG&E's attention, perhaps even an audit of her meter, to no avail.

Then it happened again this summer -- no bill for August. She's expecting another whopper, a summertime whopper.

So, she called me. I advised her to sign a waiver allowing PG&E to discuss her account with me, which she did. Almost as soon as she dropped it off at the downtown office, she got two calls from PG&E reps.

"I think it's really sad I have to sign a waiver and get the press involved for them to call me back," she said.

Even so, when PG&E's reps first called her, they were so vague and indirect, Connally asked one of them if he were reading from a script.

I called one of those reps back and got what sounded like a legitimate answer. Connally's SmartMeter (yes, the second generation super smart one) was geared to give several reads a day because the previous owner of her home was on a SmartRate program that required numerous readings a day. If the meter missed even one reading, a bill wouldn't be generated, which is what happened last fall and again this summer.

Once they got Connally's meter off the SmartRate readings, that should fix the problem, PG&E's Brian Alexander told me.

That's great for Connally, well, after all the rigmarole she went through.

But what about that automated flagging system Burt told us about?

"It's just ridiculous that you have to publicly embarrass them before they do anything to help their customers," Connally said.

Though she was still frustrated with PG&E, Connally did glean a key bit of information she wanted to share.

Remember the phrase "inability to conserve," which means if you are prevented from knowing your usage, PG&E will lower your bill under the theory that had you known how much power you were using, you could have toned it down.

"You know, this isn't about me. I can pay my bill," Connally said, anger evident in her voice. "I'm just sick of them stomping on people!"

Well, I'm sure that's all about to change now that PG&E wants to rebuild our trust in it.

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