You may be seeing a one-time credit of $17.61 on your next hydro bill.
Over 47,000 Greater Sudbury Hydro (GHS) electricity customers will see it applied. The refunds total nearly $920 000.
Wendy Watson, Director of Communications for Greater Sudbury Utilities, says the error was discovered internally in early March, was corrected and then reported to the Ontario Energy Board.
“The OEB has accepted GSH’s Assurance of Voluntary Compliance, which will see all customer groups refunded for the past four years of the overcharge,” reads a statement from Watson. “The overcharges were the result of an error in the way the billing system was prorating approved fixed charges. The GSH billing system calculated a daily prorated charge incorrectly. Instead of multiplying the approved monthly amount by 12 and then dividing by 365 to arrive at a daily rate, the system divided the monthly charge by 30, and then multiplied by 12, which made it look like there were 360 days in the year. In 2020, a residential customer would have been overcharged $5.09.”
GSH will also pay an administrative penalty of $5000 to the OEB.
“We apologize for this mistake. We truly value our customers and are aware of the faith they place in us,” said Watson, Director of Communications for Greater Sudbury Utilities. “Since discovering this error, we took steps to correct it, reported it, and have cooperated with our regulator to make things right, and we will continue with our mandate to distribute electricity as reliably and efficiently as possible and deliver value to our shareholder.”