Phil G from Richmond, VA. I always request 24 months minimum of billing history because most lookback periods are 2-3 years and you need enough data to identify patterns. Most utilities hand it over without complaint. But Dominion Energy gave me grief last week — they said their standard release is 12 months and anything beyond that requires a special request to their records department with an additional 2-3 week processing time. Anyone else running into this?
Which utilities fight you on releasing 24-month billing history
Phil, Duke Energy Carolinas limits online portal access to 13 months. For anything older you have to call the commercial billing department and request a historical data pull. They charge $25 for pulling records older than 24 months. I always request 36 months in my initial LOA data request — that way if they only give me 24, I still have enough. If they give me all 36, even better.
Duquesne Light in Pittsburgh will give you 36 months of billing summaries without any pushback. But interval data — the 15-minute demand data — they will only release 12 months unless you specifically cite the PUC regulation requiring them to provide it. Pennsylvania PUC Order 2009-1 requires utilities to provide up to 36 months of interval data upon customer request. I have that order number memorized.
ComEd in Illinois makes it easy — their commercial portal has 24 months of both billing history and interval data downloadable in CSV format. No phone call needed, no special request. Login with the LOA credentials they set up and download everything. It is the gold standard for data access.
Yuri, ComEd sounds like a dream. Dominion makes you fight for every month of data beyond 12. I have started including a sentence in my LOA that says I hereby request a minimum of 36 months of billing history and interval data for the accounts listed. Having it in the LOA puts the request on record so if they only provide 12 months, I can point to the signed authorization and escalate.
MLGW in Memphis is another difficult one. They will give you 12 months in their office on paper printouts. For anything older you have to submit a formal records request and wait 4-6 weeks. And they do not have interval data available for most commercial accounts because their AMI rollout is still in progress. Sometimes I end up working with whatever data is available and noting the limitation in my report.
Terry raises a good point about working with limited data. Not every audit has 36 months of clean interval data. Sometimes you get 12 months of billing summaries and that is it. The audit is still worth doing — you can identify rate classification errors, tax exemption issues, and obvious billing anomalies from 12 months of summary data. The demand charge and TOU analysis just requires more assumptions when interval data is not available.
Randy, agreed. I would rather do a partial audit with 12 months of data than no audit at all. But I always document what I requested vs what I received. If a future dispute requires older data, having a record that the utility limited my initial request strengthens the argument for extended lookback.