PEPCO Wants MD Customers to Pay for Good Service

Maryland power company PEPCO is notorious for having problems delivering reliable service to customers. Their day-to-day reliability has been declining steadily over the past five years. The company is now ranked among the worst in the entire industry terms of reliable electricity and customer satisfaction. To give you an idea of how bad the situation is, think about the fact that the average Pepco customer experienced seventy percent more electricity outages than customers of other big city utilities!

Winter is the worst time for these problems to happen. Customers of this electric company frequently find that their power goes out quickly and for long periods of time when there is a snowstorm. Customers who rely on electricity to heat their homes are in big trouble when this happens. And even other customers often can’t afford for their electricity to go out in the winter when daylight hours are short.

PEPCO claims that it plans to change, offering better service over the next five years. Five years is a long time for customers to wait for better service and there’s an even worse catch; they’ll have to pay to get that better service! In order to be able to deliver good, reliable service, the company says that it needs to make $100 million of changes in Maryland alone. They want to pass those costs on to customers.

PEPCO has asked regulators to approve a rate hike. The average Maryland electricity customer will pay an extra $1 per month if the rate hike is approved. The increase would be phased in with increases starting in approximately eighteen months. Consider the fact that it could be another three and a half years after that before the service improvements would actually be implemented. That’s almost fifty bucks that each customer would pay during that time for service that might not be any better than it is currently. That’s fifty bucks that you could keep in your own pocket!

The good news is that Baltimore electricity customers and other customers throughout Maryland have the option of choosing an electricity provider other than PEPCO. Thanks to deregulation of the industry, there is no need to keep paying a lot of money for bad service. Instead, customers can switch to an electricity provider that offers reduced rates right now and residents can receive a lower PEPCO electric bill. That plan just makes sense!

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/06/AR2010120607356.html