A hitherto hidden benefit of the Chinese owning 21% of Portugal’s electricity supplier EDP is the current testing with a view to purchase of new ‘smart meters’ from Chinese manufacturer Kaifa.
EDP needs to invest in new meters, the new batch is being tested in Lisbon for three months, but why this has taken 18 months since the current EDP meters were proved to be faulty is not explained.
EDP's weak claims is that the price of meters has stopped the company re-equipping its customers but now that prices have come down, it is in the market for some smart technology.
These Chinese meters are the first to be installed and will be tested against models from local suppliers Efacec and Sogecam-Novabase.
In 2013 Portugal’s Energy Services Regulatory Authority instructed EDP to pay our €7 million to compensate consumers on bi and tri-hourly tariffs whose meters has been set incorrectly, to EDP’s monetary huge advantage.
In a move that gained the supplier few friends, EDP went to court to resist paying out a cent to the 800,000 consumers who had been ripped off.
The energy supplier at first said there was ‘one faulty batch of meters’ which was not true. The company then said ‘only a few thousand customers were affected’ which also was no true.
Truth and EDP are unhappy bedfellows and it is hoped that the new smart meters will provide the customer with a service which is accurate, timely and easy to understand as trust needs to be built up between the former state monopoly which now competes in a market with other service providers.
Consumer watchdog DECO tested a sample of meters and estimated that hundreds of thousands of EDP meters were faulty and that thousands of customers had been overcharged.
EDP was told to compensate customers, but later refused to pay up and took its own regulator to court to avoid a relatively small compensation payment.
The payments eventually were paid but few figures have been released as to the amount.
The new Chinese meters should enable smarter and more accurate billing. The next thing for EDP management to do is to make the bills understandable.
