METER: NERC GIVES TWO-WEEK ULTIMATUM TO DISCOS

Succour may have come the way of electricity consum¬ers whose metres are yet to be delivered months after payments as Nige¬ria Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, has given Distribution Com¬panies, Discos, two weeks within which to deliver their metres.
The NERC chairman, Dr. Sam Amadi, who dis¬closed this yesterday dur¬ing a meeting with the Discos and stakeholders on Aggregate Technical Commercial and Collec¬tion loss studies in Abuja, said the commission will not view with levity fail¬ure to provide the custom¬ers with metres.
“By this week we are sending letters to all the Discos. The commissioner for consumer affairs is already preparing the let¬ters. We will give Discos two weeks to make sure they fully metre all those who have paid because the order of the commission is 45 days. After the two weeks, we will conduct public hearings to ascer¬tain whether all those who have paid for CAPMI metres have been metred.
“And the commission will view very seriously failure to meter these con¬sumers. So I want to as¬sure those of you writing us with complaints that they paid for CAPMI me¬tres in the last three, four months, and we will en¬sure in the coming weeks that those who have not been metred get theirs. And Discos that have not metreed consumers who paid for it will be sanc¬tioned,” he stated.
He assured that all writ¬ten complaints to the com¬mission over metering would be pursued to logi¬cal conclusion.
Earlier, NERC ex¬plained that it was work¬ing hard to ensure that electricity distribution companies provided me¬tres to their customers, noting that the metering gap in the country was huge.
Amadi spoke shortly after an event in Abuja: “Our expectation is that metering will increase, but let us be very careful. The metering gap in Nige¬ria is about 50 per cent and we don’t expect that gap to be closed in a short while. What we expect to see is significant and consistent effort by the distribution companies to keep meter¬ing their customers.
“Of course the gap can close quickly if increase in capacity results in in¬crease in revenue, and the regulator will benchmark that increase in revenue. But we expect to see con¬tinuous and good effort by the Discos to metre their consumers and quickly close down the gap. But the gap will still be there for some time because it is a huge gap.”
On the methodology employed by the Discos in billing non-metred con¬sumers, Amadi said the commission had educated the power firms on how to go about it properly.
He said, “We worked them through the method¬ology and this is because some of them are new in the sector. By this meth¬odology, before the Discos estimate your bill, they would have looked at the energy supply in that clus¬ter.
“They would have looked at the metered cus¬tomers in that cluster and be able to have a much more accurate estimation. What is going on now in some cases is not estima¬tion, it is just arbitrary way of tariff and we have expressed a very strong disapproval on that. Give and take, there will be some margin of error, but it will come close to some level of accuracy.
“A consumer should also be able to benchmark his bill based on what his metered neighbour is re¬ceiving as tariff. So, if for example, an average customer in your area pays N5,000 or N10,000 and your Disco is giving you N15,000 bill, that is a smoking gun.”
Source: National Mirror