According to this WMTW TV news story, CMP has under-billed several thousand customers. And, CMP is thinking of possibly spreading the missed charges throughout their customer base. How wrong is that? Completely wrong – other customers should not pay for electricity used by any other customer.
So the number seems to be 3,400 customers were under-billed. There is no mention of a dollar amount, but I’m pretty sure it would be easy for CMP to figure that out. In fact, they should already know what it is. So how much?
Here’s a kicker, according to the published story, CMP is blaming it on a rash of recent retirees who failed to keep up with accounts. Can you say “Hello, computer automation”? And no, it is simply poor sportsmanship to blame it on retirees. One could say procedural problems, and thus management.
The linked WMTW news article is very sparse. So here’s some farside data to fill that in. Note that some info is actually real.
Naturally, I bet the next thing CMP will come out with is that they lost all customer security deposits, and because that is a kind of revenue, that they’ll need to spread the loss amongst the customer base for that. LOL, just saying.
Anyway, years ago, we manually marked up where the meter dials were for our bill, and sent those in. If CMP had to do an estimate, they did. Once a real person read the meter, any discrepancies in the energy used by that single customer would reconcile eventually. That should not be the problem now, either with smart meters nor analog meters, so I assume it isn’t.
And who are these 3,400 clients? Do they have special billing privileges that are exceptions to the billing structures and thus are handled manually and not by extremely accurate and faithfully never-wrong computer algorithms? That can’t be it.
Well, according to the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife website, there are about 76,000 moose in Maine. In the fridge research, I’m putting it out there that there are likely some 3,400 moose living in close proximity to electrical facilities and power transmission lines. Moose absorb electricity at 1/5 KWh per year. Maybe more because those beasts can weigh a thousand pounds or more, or less, or more-or-less. That means 3,400 moose make off with roughly 680 KWh total per year. At .071 cents per KWh, that means revenue lost to moose absorbency is about $48.28 a year. After taxes, baseline fees, delivery fees, special fees, hidden fees, golf cart fees, parking fees, storage fees, legal fees, underreported late fees, season ticket fees, duplicate fees, association fees, South Portland plastic bag fees, drive-by fees, wire-watching fees, Canadian fees, occasional fees, spare part fees, incentive fees, 401k management fees, fees fees, Burt’s Bees, fuzzy fees, shop supply fees, Mooselookmeguntic Lake fees, and adjustment fees to the Federal government’s $96 million dollar smart meter implementation stimulus grant, the grand lost revenue total is $20,789,734.54 … even. Oddly enough, that is suspiciously looking like the CMP Lewiston office’s phone number (207) 897-3454.
I believe they are adding phone numbers, house numbers, random numbers, retired numbers, irrational numbers, and imaginary numbers into the lost revenue audit process totals. Either that or the moose have hacked the Internet.
UPDATE 2018-12-05: Newspaper reports on Portland Press Herald website.