PPL is Lancaster County’s primary electricity provider, with approximately 272,000 customers here. So its billing failures are a big deal.

But the frustrations being felt by PPL customers over the company’s billing screw-ups can be understood by anyone who’s struggled in recent years to get a human on the phone to discuss a customer service issue.

This statistic reported by Scheid gets to the heart of this saga: From the end of December 2022 through April 2023, a whopping 41% of calls to PPL were abandoned without customers being able to reach a representative.

If it were possible to turn customer anger and frustration into electricity, PPL could have powered a whole Pennsylvania city.

As Scheid reported, the proposed settlement would require PPL to pay a $1 million civil penalty and absorb more than $16 million in related costs. According to the settlement, PPL has refunded approximately $1 million to customers statewide who were overbilled.

Some Americans talk about wanting to see deregulation and small government, but the reality is that we need oversight of utilities such as PPL. We wouldn’t know the scale of PPL’s customer service failures were it not for the PUC investigation.

From Scheid’s reporting: “Of the more than 860,000 estimated bills issued between December 2022 and May 2023, the investigation revealed that 67.31% (261,104 customers) of the bills had an estimate 10% or more above the customers’ actual usage. Nearly 48,000 customer bills were based on an estimate different from actual usage by more than 50%.”

That is terrible.

In an interview with LNP ‘ LancasterOnline, Christina Hausner of East Hempfield Township accurately pointed out that shoddy service erodes faith in a utility.

In her comment to the PUC, Hausner noted that she has no quarrel with the monetary settlement, but believes that “in addition to the monetary terms ... PPL should be required to augment its customer service and practices by which it communicates with customers and processes their questions and complaints.” She wrote that “PPL must provide an avenue other than an understaffed phone number to process complaints and questions.”

Hausner, the former Lancaster County solicitor, is absolutely right.

Audrey A. Geib, corporate secretary of the Manheim Historical Society, wrote in her comment to the PUC that she had prepared a spreadsheet showing that her organization had been overcharged for more than 7,000 kilowatt-hours.

“Some adjustments were made by PPL, but due to the complexity of their billing, I was not always able to match the adjustments to a specific bill,” Geib wrote. “Many of the bills we received did not have dates on them. Also, their website did not allow me to access prior year bills for information to complete my work.”

Geib clearly has the technical and analytical skills to track PPL’s billing errors, but even she was stymied by the utility’s website.

Imagine being a PPL customer without the technology and ability to put together a spreadsheet or to ferret out billing mistakes.

PPL isn’t a small, family-run business with limited resources. A company of 1,700 employees must be able to effectively communicate not only with customers who use email, but those who still rely on their phones.

In a four-page handwritten letter to the PUC, Lancaster County resident Lucy Tristani described herself as a 93-year-old woman getting by on a limited income. She noted that keeping up with the charges had been “difficult, to say the least.” The ordeal, she wrote, had exacted an indescribable emotional toll.

It is, she wrote, “incredible” that PPL “can create problems of such magnitude as to disrupt the lives of thousands.” PPL “has to be made accountable and the thousands of customers should be recompensed for all we have been through.”

We strongly agree.

The Pennsylvania Office of Consumer Advocate expressed similar concerns.

In a letter to the PUC, that office urged that customers be fully compensated. It also recommended that the PUC require PPL to complete a root cause analysis to determine how the billing system malfunctions impacted customer balances, service terminations and late fees. As Scheid reported, “The Office of Consumer Advocate also recommended that between $500,000 and $750,000 of the $1 million penalty be directed to the Hardship Fund and that like the civil penalty, PPL be prohibited from claiming any charitable deduction for this contribution.”

This all makes perfect sense.

We urge the PUC to increase its oversight of PPL in the wake of this debacle. And we ask state lawmakers to redirect their energy from ginned-up culture wars to advocating for constituents put through the ringer by PPL.

And PPL: Do better. A lot better.

LNP/LancasterOnline