Utilities supply our communities with electricity and gas. Any interruption in that service can lead to a spike in customer complaints. When that happens, the Public Service Commission (PSC)steps in to investigate.   The Public Service Commission reviewed New York’s major utilities in terms of their performance including electric reliability service, electric safety, gas safety, and customer service. Most of New York’s utilities met or exceeded the standards of performance regarding customer service. However, six utilities did not rank well:
- Central Hudson Gas and Electric Corporation failed to meet all three of its metric targets, resulting in a negative adjustment of $2.87 million.Â
- NYSEG and RG&E each failed to meet all four of their respective metric targets, resulting in negative adjustments of $8.72 million and $5.9 million.Â
- Consolidated Edison Company of New York failed to meet its call answer rate metric, resulting in a negative revenue adjustment of $4 million.
- Liberty Utilities d/b/aSt. Lawrence Gas and National Grid (upstate)Â each failed to meet their metric for the customer satisfaction survey resulting in a negative revenue adjustment of $36,000 and $1.05 million.
In total, penalties were nearly 10 times higher than the $2.3 million in 2021. Investigations by the Public Service Commission regarding billing are ongoing.Â
New York Electric and Gas and Rochester Gas and Electric released a statement in answer to the PSC report, “NYSEG and RG&E continue to make significant improvements and investments. In fact, the Companies have already made significant improvements to customer service, drastically lessening customer wait times above the required metric, improving the accuracy of billing, and hiring hundreds of new staff to reverse the severe Pandemic-related staffing impacts on monthly meter reading and billing. The Companies also continue improvements on reliability, replacing tens of thousands aging poles and other equipment that contribute to outages, which impacted 600K homes across the state in 2022 alone. These are very real actions the Companies are taking daily and that are outlined in the joint rate proposal with PSC.”