Electricity lights, warms and cools our homes and businesses. It also lights our streets at night. It powers countless machines that make possible many thousands of our jobs.
Fortunately, through the Tennessee Valley Authority and our local distributor, the Electric Power Board, electric rates are generally pretty reasonable.
But once in a while, if we use a lot of electricity for heating or cooling, depending upon the weather, we may have (pardon the pun) a “shocking” power bill.
But that’s nothing like the shock that one local business, Intersign Corp., got recently.
The firm was told its power bill was doubling – and it owed $121,000 for electricity over the past three years!
What had happened?
The Electric Power Board reportedly had a transformer problem that caused erroneously low electricity billing for the past five years.
(It was reported that 200 other meters also have had such errors since 2005.)
EPB surely must collect for its power service, to be fair to all customers. And all customers have to pay. But since EPB apparently had the transformer error that caused the big power bill – and the customer was unaware at the time – shouldn’t reasonable and fair-minded people get together to resolve this unique problem in an economically reasonable way?