Pepco wants DC residents to pay a $360k bill after stealing from solar customers
Fraud, meddling, and a lack of consequences has been the name of the game for Pepco when it comes to solar. Remember when Pepco was caught undercrediting Solar For All customers to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars? As part of DC’s community solar program, residents can subscribe to a solar facility and benefit from the solar generation, often putting these clean energy credits towards lowering their bills. Pepco, in charge of counting these credits, systematically mishandled them, overcharging residents by over $800,000.
From a complaint filed by the DC Office of the Attorney General and the Office of the People’s Counsel (OPC), the utility regulators at the Public Service Commission found Pepco was in violation of DC law, illegally installing the wrong meters, robbing residents of savings on their bills. Despite the six-figure total in stolen savings, Pepco was not fined.
Instead, the PSC needed to figure out “reconciliation,” or the exact figure each resident was owed from Pepco’s meddling. The PSC would appoint an independent auditor and Pepco would foot the bill. Seems straightforward enough. It wasn’t.
The audit was near useless: Pepco failed to comply with simple data and file sharing requests to the point the contract with the auditor ran out of time and Commissioner Beverly made a formal inquiry regarding Pepco’s meddling conduct. The cost of this basically useless audit? Just over $362,000 across three orders. But Pepco doesn’t want to pay for it anymore - they want DC residents and businesses to foot the bill.
It’s a classic corporate move: fleece customers, get caught, and try to get the public to bail you out. The need for the audit came from Pepco’s actions in the first place. Then, through Pepco’s noncompliance, that $362k audit was rendered worthless. And instead of biting the bullet and being thankful for not being fined in the first place, Pepco wants to scam DC again by passing this bill onto ratepayers. As the OPC says, “consumers should not be held responsible for [Pepco’s] mistakes, omissions, or failures.”
The Public Service Commission needs to deny Pepco’s request to offload the audit’s cost onto ratepayers and enforce strict oversight of compliance for solar credits. Still, solar customers have not been paid for what Pepco took from them. Even worse, Pepco is still the authority overseeing these solar credits.
Our call to action is simple: keep the $362k bill with Pepco, change solar rules to benefit DC customers and climate law, and promote straightforward, renewable benefits. Sign our letter to the Public Service Commission to deny Pepco’s scam tactics and support DC residents.
As we go forward, We Power DC and our coalition partners are actively exploring ways to bring solar and DER metering under DC government control. This removes authority from Pepco as they have shown to be an untrustworthy, unreliable, and expensive manager of this program.