Utilities Billing Practices

[codetrap]

So, I'm probably showing up like a nut this morning, but I finally got mad enough about the stupid billing I'm seeing fro my natural gas bill I wrote a letter.

Sent it to:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
and submitted it on atco's online form, since they don't believe in email.


Here it is...



Hello,

Please explain this to me. Why is it that 76% of my GAS bill is fee's. Is ATCO so inefficient a company that they're unable to make a profit from natural Gas, but they have to gouge us with insane billing? Here's my interpretation of my bill.

Actual Gas Charge $16.13 - The ACTUAL GAS charge, verified in the market index.

Explainable Fee's. Everyone's got to make some money.
ATCO Fixed Charge $20.16 - supposedly the set cost of the infrastructure AKA ADMINISTRATION FEE
Municipal Franchise $5.80 - City of Calgary imposed Tax.
ATCO Variable Charge $6.26 - supposedly the cost to deliver the gas on said infrastructure
ATCO Storage Rider $1.48 - the cost imposed on ATCO by outside storage companies
-------
33.70

Utterly stupid Fee's
Transaction Fee $2.73 - A way to jack up the price of NG since it's pretty low.
Energy Charge $2.11 - An Additional amount added to each GigaJoule to jack up the price
Administration Charge $5.35 - Wasn't this already paid in the ATCO Fixed Charge?
Administration Charge $1.19 - WTF? How much administration is going on here.
Transmission Service $0.22 - Duplicate of the Variable Charge
Pension & Benchmark $4.44 - I don't have a Pension with ATCO, why do I contribute to it?
-----
$16.04

So, ATCO is DOUBLING the cost of my gas in sneaky underhanded fee's.
How exactly can this be justified and allowed through all the "protection" that the consumer board is supposed to afford us? Who is actually representing the people on this? The ones like me that are being gouged repeatedly. What value am I getting for these fee's? The joy of watching ATCO post record earnings in 2009, and having a very strong 2010 Q3? What is the point of spending thousands of dollars making my home more energy efficient if I am unable to realize the savings due to increasing price gouging by the utilities?

This has been submitted to ATCO's online form as well, since they don't apparently use email addresses.

<return information removed>

[FraserB]

You have it good, they are not charging you a fee to send you a bill.

$3.00 to slap a $0.60 stamp on an envelope that is licked by someone making $12.00/hr.

I no longer bother trying to be energy efficient, it simply isn't worth the cost. Spend thousands to save a bit on 20% of you bill.:nut:

[speedog]

Deregulation - that's what created a lot of these fees. Many years ago (15 years plus), the bills were quite straight forward, but as industries such as electricity, natural gas and telecommunications became more and more deregulated as per the government's claim that the pubic wanted this and that actual costs to the end consumer would decrease as a result, we are seeing more and more unregulated charges showing up on our utility bills.

For sure, the actual cost of the still regulated natural gas product or electricity or basic long distance/local land line telephone services has probably dropped over the years, these same providers have increasingly nickelled and dimed their customers with more and more fees, charges and services that are not regulated. I can look back at my TELUS telephone bills from many, many years ago and see that my basic land line and long distance services have indeed dropped, but in the end I have seen very little savings as a consumer because of all the additional unregulated fees, charges, etc.

And the telecommunications industry is quite tame with respect to additional fees, etc - the electricity and natural gas industries have gotten all of these additional charges down to a fine art and in fact, I am sure if you look hard enough at your natural gas bill, they're probably charging you a monthly anti-competitive practices fee for farting in your own home.

[DENZILDON]

^^^ pretty much right on. The govt passed a bill a few years back approving that these charges are to be paid by the customers. And with Bill 50 being passed you should expect to pay more in the next years to come even of you used nothing for a month for elec and/or gas.

[Everlast]

Check the dates for some of those charges.

The double admin charge you have there is most likely because the bill spans 2 months.

Ie. Oct 12-Oct 31 = $5.35
Nov 1 - Nov 12 = $1.19

Regarding transmission and distribution charges:

One charge is a flat rate multiplied by the number of days you were billed for.
Other charge is a rate multiplied by the amount of consumption (GJ) that you used.

Transaction fee is the $ that Enmax makes for being the middle man between you and ATCO (who can't be their own retailer due to regulations)

Hope that helps a bit.

[Mar]

I called them about the same thing, I talked to about 10 different people before I found someone that actually knew what the terms and acronyms meant. And even then it was a collaborative effort around the company.

The way I deal with it is I think of it like this.....they could easily tell you what they're selling it for and say it's $100, that's the cost, shop around if you like. This is what most businesses do.
Or they could break it down for you and tell you 10% is for profit through administration, 20% is for profit through delivery, 40% is for profit somewhere else. It doesn't change the end price they're charging you for it, it just outlines their bullshit reasoning.

So basically if McDonald's outlined the price of their drinks like this:
- 6 cents = base cost of drink
- 3 cents = base cost of cup
- 95 cents = delivery fee
- 67 cents = marginal markup fee
- 32 cents = something else
....would you still buy it? I'm happy they're at least outlining it and not just hiding things in the cost.

[cde1966]

On one of my gas bills from a few years back had a "revenue short fall" charge. This was because they didn't make enough money the month before so they added on an extra $3-$4...

I do have a nice trick for screwing, I mean recovering some of the cost of the gas that I consume over the year from the gas company. It's doing the opposite of what they did to me one year. What they did was under estimate my meter reading for the summer and then in the middle of the January they started over estimating what I was using. Cost of gas in the summer=$2/Gigajoule cost in the winter was $9/Gigajoule, so what they had me doing was buying the gas in the winter for what I was using in the summer. So for a few years I did the opposite by calling in my own meter readings. Then King Ralph started to subsidise the cost of gas and it wasn't worth it, however today could be a different story... I'll need to check my readings to see if they are try to screw me over again.

[codetrap]

Did I mention I love to stir the pot?


On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Tighe, Tony (Global Calgary) <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi,
> We received your email from Global Toronto.
> This is a great observation and a great idea for a news story.
> I am away for the next week but will look into it when I get back.
> I'll be in touch.
>
> Tony Tighe
> Global TV
> Calgary
>