Customers Complain About Smart Meters

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (CBS 5) - Do you have one of those new PG&E Smart Meters?

They're supposed to help you understand your energy use. But CBS 5 Investigates has heard from many viewers who think smart meters have done anything but.

If you don't have Smart Meters yet, you will, and there's no choice. They'll be installed in all Bay Area homes by 2012. But some viewers are asking CBS 5 to 'Investigate This': If the meters are so great, why do their bills seem to be going up? We put the questions to PG&E, and received some surprising answers.

"They're an absolute critical first step," said Andrew Tang, Senior Director for Demand-side Management Products for PG&E. A first step toward a new way of monitoring your energy use. "Now we don't have to send people to individual homes and read meters any more," said Tang.

Instead, PG&E will be able to read these meters remotely, and not just by the month but by the hour. And they say they'll be able to control your energy usage remotely too. So if there's a heat wave for example, the utility can turn your air conditioning down from a distance, which they say may avoid rolling blackouts and reduce the need for expensive power plants.

In the long run, PG&E even promises Smart Meters will help customers know when to conserve energy, so they can save money. "I do believe bills will go down," said Tang.

But so far, some customers say the result has been just the opposite. When PG&E rolled out the meters in the Central Valley last summer, State Senator Dean Florez said, "What we saw is an outcry from folks from Bakersfield to Fresno."

After listening to those complaints, Senator Florez told CBS 5 Investigates: "I think PG&E has been less than truthful." About what? The explanations Senator Florez said the company gave some of those customers, such as telling them their old meters just weren't as accurate as the smart meters.

"There's no doubt that PG&E has lied to its customers when it comes to replacing the old meters with the new meters and somehow saying the old meters were defective," Florez said.

Something Tang admitted to CBS 5 isn't true.

CBS 5 asked Tang, "Should PG&E customer service representatives be saying to somebody on the phone well, it's probably just that your old meters were inaccurate?"

"No, they shouldn't," said Tang. "The customer service response I think, is, not consistent."

Tang blamed the Central Valley's higher bills primarily on a hotter-than-normal summer. But if that's the case, why have there been complaints all over the Bay Area, such as in Pittsburg where Jennifer Krivanek's PG&E bill jumped from $80 to $329. "It just went up," she said.

Or in Brentwood where homeowner Steve Moon said: "I got a bill in December for $1,107. There's got to be a mistake."

No mistakes, said PG&E. After reviewing their accounts, the company said their meters were working correctly, just like those of 1,500 other Californians who complained. "Out of that 1,500, we haven't found any issues," said Tang.

But consumer advocate Mindy Spatt with the non-profit group TURN said that still doesn't explain something else. "Customers with the Smart Meters claim that their energy 'usage' has inexplicably risen since the meters were put in," she said.

"So all of a sudden it makes it look like they are using twice as much energy as they used to?" CBS 5 asked Spatt. "Exactly," she said.

Such as Concord's Bill Galvin: "When you start getting bills like this, I mean it just blows a person away," he said. He doesn't use his gas furnace much, his thermostat stays at 62 degrees.

His bill used to run about a hundred dollars, but after he got a gas smart meter? "The last bill I received is $380 and how come, I don't know," Galvin said.

But when Galvin called PG&E to tell them something was clearly wrong, he said, "All they would tell me is you're using too much juice, too much power. They don't want to deal with you."

After CBS 5 Investigates asked PG&E, a crew went out to his house to check and found that Smart Meter was incorrectly installed.

"We're incredibly sorry that this happened, it shouldn't have happened," said Tang. "Mr. Galvin's case is really one of the first cases that we've found."

"So you're saying that Mr. Galvin has the only meter with a problem?" CBS 5 asked Tang. "To date, this is, Mr. Galvin's case, is unique, it's the first one we've seen," he said.

And as to the other complaints of higher bills? Tang said many consumers simply don't realize that rates have increased. "If there was a failure on our part, it was a communication failing on the rate increase," Tang said. What does he think went wrong? "We didn't communicate anything about rate increases."

And one of the reasons for those rate increases? The $2.2 billion needed to put in those Smart Meters.

"The first people paying into this should have been the utilities, not the consumers," State Senator Florez said.

"From the consumer perspective, 'what am I getting from my investment in the meter?' Right now it seems like consumers have gotten nothing but trouble," said Spatt.

PG&E maintains the overall complaint rate for smart meters isn't different from that of the old meters, and the complaints reflect a typical pattern of summer and winter complaints about high bills. But given what we found with Bill Galvin's gas meter, the company said it is now changing its processes for checking meter performance. That one they say was a quote, "big mistake". The Public Utilities Commission also said they're investigating the meter issues.
 
http://www.kcbs.com/bayareanews/Customers-Complain-About-Smart-Meters/6424878