Wow, is it possible that PG&E is this backward? (dare I say stupid?)

So, now that I have my first bill, I just had a call with PG&E, my wonderful provider of Gas and Electricity.  Before I launch into them, I must say that Natalie, my customer service rep, was friendly, informative, compassionate, and overall, a great customer service person.  Unfortunately, the execs she works for are complete freaking morons.  Wait, was that my outside voice?

Here is the lunacy of the day.  I was puzzled by my latest bill (surprised?), so I called, and as I said, Natalie walked me through it in a friendly, helpful manner (she's POTS!)  Here were the highlights of our call, some interesting (In:), most idiotic (Id:), as noted by those initials below.

• In: Today, PG&E has a pretty well managed website, offering both online access to all current information, as well as PDFs of all previous bills, which are not only downloadable, but even dynamically comparable month-to-month, year-to-year, etc., as I showed in my previous blog post.
• Id: That's today.  Tomorrow, because I opted to go with cutting technology, they figured it made sense to slow down, and take several steps backward.  A few examples.  Hopefully this is coherent, because, being a tech guy, I'm so distraught by their lack of foresight, that I'm almost shaking.
• Id: Going forward, bills will only show my gas usage, and the monthly minimum of $4.14 for "access to electricity"
• Id: A separate "Net Energy Metering Electric Statement", which covers the solar aspects, will be sent to show the electricity usage, net of what I generated.  This is a paper only bill. Not available online, and completely disconnected from rest of the billing/web system that was working well today.
• Id: They forecast for those systems to be aligned is mid-2012.  Apparently, PG&E was taken a bit by surprise from the last decade's growing trend of moving to alternative energy, led by solar. Wow.
• In: Each house, in each region, has a baseline rate, which determines how much in first billing tier (and subsequent in tiers 2-5)  No problem, that's not new.  This determines what PG&E charges us for vs what we're generating from our solar panels.
• In: We have a choice of paying the delta between usage and generation (the "net" metered usage) either monthly, or at the end of the "True-Up" period, which is August 2012.  Cool.
• Id: If I opt for the pay-as-you-go model (smart budgeting in my view), it's up to me as a consumer to figure out, manually, what I should pay each month, by adding the amounts that come to my house on two bills, completely independently of each other.  For example, let's say my Gas + Min service bill equals $30, and my "Net Metering" elecrtricity bill is $70, totalling $100.  Fortunately, I can still write one check to cover both. Sort of...
• Id: Now, get this.  I send a check for $100 to cover both bills.  Great.  However, when I get my next month's bill, it will show that my "bill" was $30, but I paid $100, so I now have a net credit of -$70.  For simplicity, let's assuming the amounts are the same the following month, and I send another check for $100.  Subsequently, I get my new bill showing that we owe $30, we paid $100, we had a credit of -$70, but now our credit is -$140.  And this goes on every month until the true up period, 11 months from now.
• Id: There is nothing automated, and no online tools to make these disparate processes easy, clearly defined or helpful.

Contrast all this with what I get from SolarCity.  I can log onto my SolarGuard account from anywhere in the world, on my PC (or on my slick new Nokia N9!), and get information that is updated every 15 mins, showing how much power I am currently generating with my 22 panels. Awesome!  That's why guys like me work on new technologies, always trying to streamline old processes  and make peoples lives easier so folks can focus on what's really important to them (not manually calculating bill payments)

You know, it just occured to me that I think I should change my tone here. Pointing fingers doesn't help, and I'm not even pointing in the right direction.  It's me I should be angry with, not PG&E.  I,foolishly, expected PG&E to be anything other than the slow moving, bureaucratic, backward thinking money grubbing idiots that they have spent decades demonstrating they are.  Silly me...

 

DMac Out...

Comments

[Russell Beattie]

I love the random plug for the N9 in the middle of a "PG&E are idiots" rant. :-)

-Russ