Overcharging leads to rebate for Essex Powerlines customers

Customers of Essex Powerlines will be seeing a small rebate on their bill in the near future after being over-billed.

Essex Powerlines will be crediting current customers a total of $453,181, the equivalent to three years of overcharges between May 1, 2019 to April 30, 2022.

The credit will work out to around $13 per customer and must be paid out within the next 90 days.

In April 2022, the Ontario Energy Board sent a letter to all licensed electricity distributors in Ontario informing them they had found a distributor had overcharged customers after incorrectly calculating prorating fixed monthly charges.

All distributors were advised to review their billing system.

Joe Barile, Vice-President of Regulatory and Corporate Affairs at Essex Powerlines, says they reported the issue to the Ontario Energy Board after a review of their computer billing system.

"The computer system was calculating a proration of 12 months times 30 days. If you do the math, that amounts to 360 days. There's not 360 days in a year, there's 365 days. Customers were being overcharged on a portion of their bills for five days extra over a period of three years," he says.

Barile says the issue has been corrected.

We recognized and reported ourselves to the OEB after they asked us to check our systems. We were completely up front with the OEB in terms of the issue. We acted to resolve it in the most reasonable amount of time and the customers should be rest assured that the computer software issue has been resolved," he adds.

Essex Powerlines corrected the computer billing issue on May 1, 2022.