AUGUSTA (NEWS CENTER Maine) – “I don’t know what they are covering up, what they’re hiding, but they’re hiding something,” Vickie Harvey Johnson, a CMP customer, told NEWS CENTER Maine. She’s one of thousands of customers who believe the company is scamming them into unfairly electric payments.
The Maine Public Utilities Commission voted in March to investigate the abnormally high bills, which they say affected more than 97,000 CMP customers. The investigation is ongoing, and the PUC is in the process of selecting a third-party company to run the audit into CMP.
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CMP says people across the country saw a spike, likely because of an unusually cold winter. Customers aren’t convinced.
In the meantime, many are blaming their ‘Smart Meters,’ which read their energy use. Hundreds of customers online say they don’t trust the automatic meters, which have been installed in most CMP households since 2012.
NEWS CENTER Maine got a first look into CMP’s Meter Lab, there these Smart Meters are tested before and throughout their use.
Nicholas Levesque, who oversees the meter testing, says the company has received more than 1,900 requests for meter testing at people’s homes. This is more than 4 times the normal amount of annual service calls. It’s reflective of the controversy and mistrust surrounding the company since the October 2017 windstorm.
“On a Smart Meter, in the last five years that I’ve [had] this role, we’ve never had a meter fail,” he said.
CMP puts Smart Meters through a rigorous testing program.
- All meters are tested at the manufacturer before they’re delivered to CMP.
- About 10 percent of new meters delivered to CMP are tested in the lab for both functionality and accuracy.
- CMP does samples of ‘field’ meters, meaning it takes meters from about 2 percent of customers’ homes each year and tests them at the lab.
- If a customer calls and requests a testing, CMP goes to their home to test the meter.
- In the lab, meters are required to be within .5 percent of accurate energy use. In the field, the state requirement is that they are within 2 percent accuracy.
The test at the lab is all automatic, and is run by a third party company. Meters are tested for small and large ‘loads’ of electricity.
Levesque says the company goes “above and beyond” state testing requirements, “because it is just good utility practice” to do so.
Levesque says service calls have started to drop – most likely, he says, because of warmer weather and electric bills returning back to normal.
Customers with high bills don’t trust the power company right now, and that’s not likely to change until the PUC investigation is complete.
CMP spokesperson Gail Rice encourages people to check and see if their supplier price went up. In the last year, the Standard Offer price went up, as well as several other companies.