Officials of Dominica Electricity Services Ltd (DOMLEC) are refuting claims about interruptions to its Pay As You Go (PAUG) services.
This, as a result of a notice which the company issued on its Facebook page and other platforms, advising its pre-paid customers “to top up sufficiently” in order to clear accumulated arrears in charges that would have occurred as a result of an interruption caused by works being undertaken on its system.
It was reported that From May 22nd-May 27th there was a delay in the reading updates to the Pay As You Go system and as a result, customers’ meters were not being read remotely on a daily basis.
This also caused the Independent Regulatory Commission (IRC) to issue a response by deeming the DOMLEC notice as “unacceptable” based on the Dominica Electricity Supply Act and directed DOMLEC to withdraw the notice “until a proper internal review and determination are made on how better to proceed by allowing customers to comfortably pay any arrears or accumulated charges in a manner that is satisfactory and reasonable, both to the IRC and the PAUG customers.”
DOMLEC’s general manager, Bertilia LeBlanc McKenzie at a press conference stated that there was no interruption in energy service to customers.
“The reliability and stability of the service was never an issue. Our messaging, while the issue was being resolved, may not have been as clear as it could have been and we also apologize for the lack of clarity… we always strive in our interactions with our customers to be timely, open, and accurate at all levels, “LeBlanc McKenzie said.
DOMLEC she stated has pledged to continuously improve, not only in its service delivery to customers but in how the company communicates with them.
“The customers were charged only for the energy they utilized and there were no overcharging occurred.”
She added, “DOMLEC didn’t disconnect any PAUG customers who were in arrears until May 27th when we were sure that the system was back to normal and operating smoothly.”
Also explaining the matter was the Electrical Engineer of DOMLEC, Kurt Savarin who stated the process or the works that were conducted to resolve the issue took a lot longer than anticipated and revealed that measures are being put in place to ensure that, “ if the system does go down again our response time would be quicker.”
According to him, the devices are read on a daily basis from DOMLEC’s AMI system and on May 22nd the schedule which is responsible for reading the devices didn’t perform as it should, “it was a very poor performance so the majority of the devices did not get read.”