PSNH: Retail Supplier's Mass Transition Cost $40,000

Executing the default-prompted mass transition of PNE Energy Supply's customers to default service cost $40,000, Public Service Company of New Hampshire said in a filing with the PUC.

Due to PNE Energy Supply's default at ISO New England, all customers of record being served by PNE as of 0001 hours on Wednesday, February 20, were transferred to PSNH's default energy service.

PSNH reported that the execution of the mass transition required, "[m]any thousands of data entries [which] had to be handled manually in order [to] ensure that customers would ultimately be billed correctly."

"Customers on budget billing; those with bill payment plans; net metered accounts; accounts with submeters or additive/subtractive meters; all customers with demand meters; all accounts in PSNH's large power billing system, and various other situations each required special handling. And, every one of the more than 7000 accounts that had to be transferred without a meter reading required PSNH to implement the changes based upon estimates of that customer's electricity usage," PSNH reported.

"The effort over that holiday weekend cost PSNH approximately $40,000 in personnel and computer programming costs," PSNH reported.

PSNH also reported that over two hundred customer accounts, "were wrongly included in the EDI transactions for transfer to FairPoint [Energy, which had purchased PNE's customers prior to the PNE default].

"These customers were receiving their electricity not from PNE, but from other competitive suppliers," PSNH said.

"Yet, they were included in the EDI transactions submitted by FairPoint as part of the PNE/FairPoint deal. Because these transactions did not involve customers moving from PNE to FairPoint, they were not identified and dropped from the EDI system upon PNE's default. Instead, the EDI system worked as intended - - as these customers' meter read dates occurred, they were transferred to FairPoint - - most all of them at a higher rate. This matter only came to light when one of these customers received a demand for an early termination payment from their previous, and correct, supplier, and complained to this Commission. With the assistance of the Commission's consumer affairs director, FairPoint reviewed the list of over 200 suspect customers' accounts slated for transfer. Only a small number of those were indeed correct. For the remainder, FairPoint immediately initiated drop transactions in the EDI system. But, for all but a handful, it was too late. The majority of the affected customer accounts had already been switched to FairPoint on their meter read dates. Bills had been rendered. Load responsibility for the electricity had already been assigned in the ISO-NE wholesale market. And — FairPoint's drop transaction will ultimately result in the customers who were wrongly switched by the erroneous EDI inputs to revert to PSNH's default service. There is no quick or economical way for PSNH to fix the continuing problem for these 150 to 175 accounts. It would not just be a bill adjustment to make customers whole -- it would entail cancellation of bills already rendered; re-billing; adjusting payments made to suppliers for those affected accounts that have already been billed; it would mean readjusting load responsibility in the ISO-NE marketplace back to mid-February," PSNH said.