One way or another, the Energy sector keeps itself in the news for
quite some time now. First it was the Big Six making headlines with raising
unexpectedly high prices and now, again the suppliers are breaking grounds by
missing the smart meter deadline. All energy companies including the Big Six
assured that by the end of 2016, they would resolve the issue of wrong smart
meter readings faced by many customers. However, they have not succeeded and
not a single supplier has managed to cut the limit of back-bills from 12 months
to six months.
As per government plans, all UK homes should have a smart meter
installation within four years. These meters are already installed in around 2
million UK homes but, are facing issues related to accuracy. Many of them which
belonged to companies that offer best home energy plans are showing readings that are six times higher than the actual
usage of energy. Due to this, Ofgem had suggested to the suppliers to cut
backdated bills with wrong readings. To its disappointment, all energy
companies have not been able to finish this task within the pre decided
deadline.
Now, the energy regulator is considering other methods to protect
the bill payer as its plan A has failed. The consumer advisory group Citizens
Advice, suggested that Ofgem should give a six month limit to the energy
companies. Gillian Guy, chief executive of Citizens Advice, said: “Smart meters
should signal the end of inaccurate bills and it’s not right that people with
this technology should suffer because of suppliers’ mistakes. Setting a limit
on the time period for which suppliers can send catch-up bills for smart meters
will give people greater protection when things go wrong.”
The advisory group also agreed that customers are coming with
complaints related to smart meters. It stated that 402 out of the 1500 smart
meter complaints were lodged for the billing issues. This was twice number of the issues reported
in the year 2015 and pin points the increase in the number of homes with these
high tech meters. The accuracy of these meters came under the scanner after one
of the SSE customer faced more than £30,000 as daily bills. This was completely
against the actual concept of the smart meters, which are trusted for their
accuracy as they do not use estimated readings but, show only the exact energy
usage.
Some of the common reasons include wrong configuration while some
of the meters were installed at a place where it cannot receive signals. Due to
all these issues, the customers have to submit the reading manually. On the
other hand, the gas and electricity suppliers blame it on the Data
Communications Company for not handling the data as it started late when
compared to the actual starting time planned as the month of November.
A representative from the trade body made up of gas and
electricity suppliers, Energy UK, said that “While the DCC has gone live, it’s
not fully operational and testing is ongoing. In order to confirm that the
system is stable, we would need DCC live operations launched, working with a
volume of meters working smoothly on DCC systems.” The energy companies had
pledged to Ofgem that they would act on the six month back billing plan once the
DCC go live.
A spokesman for Ofgem said: “We want to see energy suppliers
making progress towards implementing a lower limit on back-billing for
customers with smart meters and are monitoring progress of this very closely.
We are currently considering whether to take further steps to protect
consumers.”
Smart Energy GB which is managing the switch from normal meters to
smart meters said that as the devices are dependent on UK mobile phone
networks, the issues are cropping. Once they have a dedicated communication
network, everything would be resolved.
To sum up, energy consumers need to wait for the
gas and electricity suppliers to rectify the errors on the smart meters and
send them back-bills with accurate usage. However, one can
compare energy prices online and switch to the top rated supplier who offers advanced smart
meter installation for free.
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Summary: The Big Six and
other gas
and electricity suppliers have failed in sending back-bills to
consumers who suffered from heavy bills due to smart meters. They missed the
deadline of sending back-bills by the end of 2016.
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