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Citizens' groups are urging WV customers of Mon Power and Potomac Edison to attend public hearings into Mon Power's billing and meter-reading practices.
A public meeting regarding the issue was held in Arnoldsburg.
The Coalition for Reliable Power and The Mountain Institute say the West Virginia Public Service Commission has received a record number of complaints in the past year.
Complaints say utility customers complain of multiple and contradictory bills in the same month, among other issues.
Calhoun resident Bill Howley of the Coalition for Reliable Power says the problems have been going on for more than two years. He says the PSC investigation is a great opportunity for change.
About a dozen Calhoun consumers brought documentation of problems with inaccurate billing by Mon Power to the Arnoldsburg meeting.
Two complainants, one from Arnoldsburg and the other from Millstone, couldn't get Mon Power to send them monthly electric bills at all.
After a couple of months of not getting electric bills, they got worried that they are running up a big bill, so they called Mon Power.
Most of the time, Mon Power sends a bill as a result of a phone call, but sometimes the company still doesn't send a bill, those bills are generally being estimates, because Mon Power doesn't send out a meter reader.
Several people at the Arnoldsburg meeting had electric bills that clearly showed estimated bills month after month.
Bill Howley and Cathy Kunkel explained that PSC rules require WV power companies to estimate bills no more than one month in a row. Mon Power has clearly violated this rule.
When FirstEnergy bought Allegheny Energy, Mon Power's parent company, FirstEnergy merged its own billing database with Allegheny's. In PSC testimony, a FirstEnergy employee called this attempted combination of billing records "a disaster."
FirstEnergy has tried to claim that last summer's derecho storm and last fall's Superstorm Sandy caused all their billing problems by disrupting their meter reading.
While these storms definitely caused problems, they do not explain why FirstEnergy's two WV power companies, Mon Power and Potomac Edison received as many billing complaints in the first five months of 2013 as they received in all of 2012.
In the midst of its database chaos and the severe storms, FirstEnergy decided to reorganize all its meter reading routes in WV. There was so much confusion that they abandoned this project after a few months.
As more bills in a row are estimated, the formula that Mon Power uses to calculate estimated bills creates even more distortion as each month passes, because the calculations use past bills to set the amounts of future estimates.
The WV-PSC has already said that considering setting performance targets, fining FirstEnergy's power companies and possibly forcing FirstEnergy to read everyone's meters every month.
Howley said, "Everyone who has problems should participate in the PSC investigation by filing complaints."
See forreliablepower.com and
calhounpowerline.com
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