San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E) customers got bigger than usual bills this past January because of record natural gas prices, but few people got the kind of bill that landed in Jack Babbitt’s lap.
The 88-year-old widower and Navy veteran was stunned when he opened a natural gas bill and it showed he owed $1,282.53.
It was a colder-than-normal winter, natural gas supplies in the region were lower than average and there were some pipeline issues that made it hard to get the commodity to Southern California.
Those factors, and likely others, pushed the price of natural gas into record territory. In fact, the $5.11 cost for a therm — a unit of heat used to measure natural gas consumption — was the highest it had ever been in January. It was more than double with the December cost of $2.55.
“First I just thought there must be a mistake,” said Doug Gastélum, Babbitt’s grandson. “Somebody typed in something wrong. There’s just a mistake. And we’ll get it corrected and we’ll be fine.”
Gastélum reached out to SDG&E to question the bill and was told there was not a mistake.
Babbitt lives alone in a trailer home that sits in a Fallbrook valley just off Interstate 15.
His trailer has the typical line-up of gas-powered appliances: a gas stove, hot water heater, furnace, and a gas clothes dryer.
But one thing Babbitt does not have is a smart meter capable of sending gas usage data directly to SDG&E. Most of the utility’s 900,000 gas customers have the modern meters.
“This is in Fallbrook,” said Anthony Wagner, a communications manager at SDG&E. “And because of the topography and because of where they’re located, they don’t enjoy the ability to have a radio signal that sends their actual (reading) — what they use for gas — on an everyday basis.”
An SDG&E employee physically comes out to Babbitt’s house and reads the analog gas meter to get an accurate measurement of gas.
The utility said that gets done every other month, and the company relies on a sophisticated computer algorithm to make estimates on those in-between months.
Babbitt’s bill indicates the in-person readings did not happen for nine billing cycles leading up to the huge January bill.
The big SDG&E bill said Babbitt used 274 therms of gas, which is nearly five times the average home’s natural gas consumption for a month.
Gastélum tried to figure out why.
“I’m going to have a look at these prior bills and see what I can learn about how this happened,” Gastélum said. “I realized they were much more complicated than I imagined. Then I started noticing this business of the … estimations of use.”
Between June and December last year, Babbitt was billed a total of about $200.
The bills indicate the charges were estimates which averaged out to about $30 a month. SDG&E said that is not entirely accurate.
“The bill says that there were nine estimates in a row, but in reality, we went to Mr. Babbitt's home two or three days after we sent him the bill,” Wagner said. “And that happened several times. So, while the bill was identified as an estimate. In reality, truthfully, we missed one estimate and that was in November.”
Wagner said the utility estimated bills in the three months prior to January, 29 therms in October, 3 therms in November, and 6 therms in December.
In the three months before that, when the utility said the meter was read after the bill was sent out, the therm usage is similar. Babbitt’s bills said he used 3 therms in July, 5 therms in August, and 4 therms in September.
Those estimates turned out to be woefully low when an actual reading was taken in January.
“Yeah, that is actually unimaginable how anybody could rack up a bill like that,” said Dan Whitworth, a consumer advocate for San Diego’s Utility Consumers’ Action Network.
There were other cases where estimated readings led to outsized bills.
“Meter readers have to go out and view the actual meter. And they are supposed to do that every two months. But the story SDG&E has been telling us is, they do not have adequate personnel to go out and do that but they are doing everything they can to train people so they can get people out there.”
Truing up the meter and bill after a long period of estimates means a customer can also end up paying above baseline rates. The utility charges more when customers use more as a way to encourage conservation.
“It always has a very, very anxiety-arousing effect on the customer to get a bill out of the blue, so large,” Whitworth said.
Regular readings in the months leading up to January could have reflected the higher-than-normal gas use which would have been a warning sign that everything was not okay.
A malfunctioning heating duct discovered in April — after the big January bill — likely contributed to Babbitt’s unusually high gas consumption. Accurate readings before January might have identified the problem before the massive bill.
“If there is a problem with your system, you will detect it sooner,” Gastélum said. “So, a lot of problems with just estimating these things month after month after month after month.”
Tomorrow: A look at how SDG&E responded after KPBS brought the billing issue to their attention.
