07-G Senate Bill 7 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

Competitive markets will not develop in the existing environment. The Legislature needs to strengthen the market power protections so that protection applies to functional markets as well as theoretical ones. Competitive Metering Will Bring Additional Confusion to the Market. The billing problems experienced throughout EKCOT in 2002 are due in part to the implementation of a radically new market design in a very short amount of time. The Retail Pilot Project, which was to be implemented in the second half of 2001, was designed to test and refine new market systems on approximately five percent of market participants prior to a full- scale market rollout in January 2002. The proposed pilot program was already an extremely short-term test of the market, consisting of only six months (many other jurisdictions opted for one to two year pilot programs), however, delays in implementation of the pilot program resulted in an even shorter test period. Although the pilot program provided clear signals that the systems necessary to support full scale implementation of customer choice were not ready in late 2001, the decision was made to proceed with customer choice in January 2002. Prior to deregulation, distribution utilities read their own customer's meters and used this data within their own companies to generate billings to customers. In the deregulated market, the distribution service providers still read the meters to collect the customer's usage information; however, they now provide that information to EKCOT who, in turn, provides it to the appropriate Retail Electric Provider (REP) for a customer. This new approach to procuring metered usage information, which involves more parties and more data transfers, is one of the major reasons why customer billings have not gone out on a timely basis. Additionally, ERCOT created workaround processes designed to speed up the transfer of this data to the REPS, by allowing the distribution companies to send data directly to REPs. The workaround processes have resulted in problems where two REPS may receive usage data for the same customer; one REP, who receives the data from ERCOT, and another REP, who receives the data from the distribution company. This results in customers receiving bills from two separate companies for the same usage. The billing problems that have existed since the start of deregulation in 2002 have resulted in numerous cases of incorrect customer bills being sent to customers by REPs. CAPP and STAP cities are addressing this problem by utilizing customer metered usage data obtained from the distribution company to check against the REP bills. CAPP and STAP have discovered the distribution company who reads a customer's meter (and has been working with usage data for many years) has been the one ~:eliable source a customer has for accurate usage data. Removing the metering function from the distribution companies and allowing a myriad of new parties to initiate reading and recording metered usage will only serve to bring further confusion to a market that has very little stability to date. 1813\O0~nac~nmo030113grog 17