Tue, 07/17/2018 - 2:15pm

GINA HAMILTON

A smart meter of the type experiencing erroneous clock speeds, according to a CMP memo. Courtesy of Anthony Watts

On July 10, the Maine Public Utilities Commission gave the company hired to audit Central Maine Power’s meter and billing system the green light to conduct an investigation into CMP’s communication and customer service.

Liberty Consulting Group is conducting both audits. According to PUC Chair Mark Vannoy, Liberty Consulting has extensive experience in customer service issues, and the company expects to complete the work on schedule.

The first reports will be issued to the PUC in draft form in October.

The amount to pay Liberty Consulting is increasing by $31,220, to a new total of $401,040, according to Harry Lamphear of the PUC. Because the Legislature overrode the governor’s veto of LD 1729, CMP shareholders might pay some of that cost.

The PUC is also doing its own investigation into the issues.

Issues with customer service came to light after numerous CMP customers complained that their concerns were not being addressed. The Wiscasset Newspaper has reported on discussions some of those customers said they had with CMP. In addition to long wait times on the telephone, sometimes stretching into hours, customers said CMP routinely told them the problem had to be on their end.

The customers said that after they hired professionals at their own expense to check appliances and electric lines in their homes, with nothing wrong, CMP customer service personnel then told them the cold snap in late December and early January was the culprit, even though many customers said they had not changed their appliance usage.

Some customers said CMP accused them of using electric space heaters and lying about it. One customer said a service agent told her, “We can’t know what you’re running in your house, all we know is how much energy you’re using.” Customers said they were often given wrong information, such as that an energy-drawing appliance uses more energy in cold weather than in warm weather. Customers said CMP would say it had changed the bill but did not change it. Issues such as getting on the smart meter online system became impossible, with customers being told that, four years into the smart meters, the online system was “not yet available in their area,” customers said.

An investigator in CMP's special unit focusing on the billing and meter issues wouldn't speak directly about any customer's case. He spoke in general about the issues customers are facing, and expressed concern that the representatives some customers spoke to had not tried to help diagnose the issue, instead, they read a laundry list of possible issues. That is a common complaint once customers are sent to his unit. However, part of the original troubleshooting is identifying appliances in the home which might malfunction. Once a customer says there have been no changes and everything is in working order, he said, the next step should be escalation without spending hundreds of dollars in a fruitless search for a problem that might not be on their end.

"Without knowing what is in the house, the reps are trained to try to identify possible issues. I absolutely understand how frustrated some customers are feeling when there is clearly an anomaly. However, once a person has filed a complaint with the PUC, he or she will be directed to one of our specialists, and we should have better luck identifying the customer's issue."

CMP spokesman Gail Rice said the company is cooperating with the investigations and has taken steps to improve its customer service, by holding additional training, hiring more agents and reorganizing the customer service department.

On Jan. 1, an 18 percent increase in the energy supply standard offer went into effect, based on a November PUC decision. This played a role in the cost increases, according to a manager in CMP’s customer service department; however, according to PUC records of the November meeting, CMP had told the PUC the 18 percent increase would cause only an eight percent increase in the average household bill, not the tripling or quadrupling the state public advocate said many customers were seeing.

In the meantime, according to a memo a CMP meter engineer, Trevor Henry, shared with the media and noted had been filed with the PUC, there were known issues with some of CMP’s smart meters, and for much longer than anyone at CMP was willing to acknowledge publicly. The memo was from Henry to General Electric. Henry blacked out the name of the recipient at GE. A GE meter, model 1-210+c, was experiencing “erroneous clock speeds,” according to the 2017 memo. Henry said the problem with the meter first came to light in 2014, and GE gave CMP a temporary solution, a “soft reset” and a firmware solution that would have been more permanent. The problems recurred in 2017, according to the memo. However, CMP had not installed the firmware. Henry cited “politics” for why the fix had not been done.

Corrected: Clock speeds have been reported to increase in warm weather and be associated with higher bills, such as took place in California. In subsequent conversation with CMP Spokesman Gail Rice, she noted Connecticut had experienced some problems with its meters which are "not the same ones we use." She said that that has not occurred in Maine, and that CMP notices immediately when the meters are speeding up and they are reset remotely. She said there does not appear to be any correlation between the high customer bills and the affected meters. She said the firmware fix has not been done because there are IT considerations that have to be worked out, but the company’s plan is to perform the fix as soon as possible.

However, some customers with the GE meters dispute Rice’s assertion that the meters aren’t causing higher bills. One customer, Christine Bennett of Eliot, said she received one of the GE meters in 2016 and it immediately began registering more than her prior meter. When the meter was replaced with the same model this April, her bills returned to pre-smart meter “normal,” she said.

The erroneous clock speeds are precipitated by some sort of power event, according to Henry. In the memo, Henry sought clarification from GE as to what kind of power event would cause the problem so the company could try to “tweak our distribution protection schemes,” thus avoiding the issue without doing the firmware upgrade.