35K National Grid customers off the hook on some bills

More than 35,000 Massachusetts customers of National Grid can breathe a sigh of relief.

The company failed to send timely bills to the tens of thousands of customers this winter due to an issue in its customer billing system, the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities wrote in a letter to National Grid on Monday.

The scale of the billing delays violated the state’s consumer protection regulations, the state said, obliging National Grid to waive charges for customers billed more than 60 days late. If the customer has already paid the bill, National Grid must credit or refund the money, the state said.

“Providing customers with accurate, timely, and transparent bills is a fundamental obligation of electric and gas distribution companies,” and when bills are substantially delayed, customers lose the ability to adjust their energy usage to stay within their financial means, the letter from Commonwealth Utilities Commission Chair James Van Nostrand and Commissioners Cecile Fraser and Staci Rubin read.

Timely billing is even more important in winters with sky-high energy costs — like this one.

When bills are delayed, it can “wreak havoc with household budgeting, and it is simply unfair to expect customers to pay multiple months’ worth of bills that were not rendered timely,” the commissioners wrote.

A spokesperson for National Grid did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

National Grid’s delayed billing was tied to a “deficiency” in its billing system identified during the changeover from off-peak to peak rates at the beginning of November.

The company told state regulators that more than 35,000 customers were not billed in October or November. By Monday, when the commissioners wrote to National Grid, 92% of the customers were again receiving regular bills.

That left 3,000 customers with five or six months of unbilled energy use. Many others, the commissioners said, “only recently” began receiving bills again, reflecting their recent three or four months of energy consumption.

The commissioners called the mix-up a “systemic and uncorrected failure.”

Regulations allow for delayed billing in unforeseen circumstances, inadvertent mistakes, and technical glitches. Recent precedents also allowed for companies to recover unbilled charges “when excusable errors result in a single unbilled month or an estimated bill for up to two months,” the commissioners wrote.

“Nothing in our regulations or precedent, however, permits an extended and unaddressed systemic error of this magnitude,” they added.

The state Department of Public Utilities fielded hundreds of calls this winter from confused customers, according to the commissioners.

They said National Grid can collect no more than two months of revenue from customers hit by the billing failure.

For customers who went unbilled since the beginning of the peak energy cost season, the company must waive charges “for any usage occurring more than 60 days prior to the date the Company sends the customer its next bill.”

The company must issue credits or refunds to customers who already paid bills that were issued late.