By Sarah Moskowitz
Executive Director
Citizens Utility Board
It’s ironic that Commonwealth Edison, a company that touts itself as a clean energy champion, has bungled its billing system so severely that it has stalled a program that has been a clean energy success story in Illinois: Community Solar.
Consumers who have benefitted from the money-saving program in the past are trying to be patient with ComEd. But it’s been four months–and now we learn that the company has the gall to try to charge customers nearly $30 million to fix a mess of its own making.
So how did we get here? First, let’s look on the bright side: Community Solar has been a sunny development in Illinois, and has become a model for other states to launch similar programs.
Created and supported by strong clean energy policy–the 2016 Future Energy Jobs Act and 2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs Act–Community Solar offers Illinois electricity customers the benefits of solar power without having to install panels at their own homes. That makes it an attractive and practical option for apartment dwellers and people with shady roofs who in the past simply could never have considered solar power.
Here’s how it works: Participants subscribe–at a discounted rate–to a portion of the energy output of a Community Solar provider’s large, offsite solar farm. Each month, those participants then get credits on their ComEd bills for the amount of power generated by their subscription.
In the last few years, CUB has talked to plenty of Community Solar customers happy to support clean energy and get a break on their bills. But that all changed on Feb. 20, when ComEd launched a billing-system revamp.
According to the utility, the supposed upgrade was “designed to deliver an improved customer experience,” but four months later, the error-prone billing system is still problematic and has effectively halted Community Solar.
We don’t have enough space to detail all the problems that Community Solar customers and providers are encountering, but here are a few examples: Community Solar credits that were supposed to help lower participants’ costs disappeared from ComEd bills. Other customers have seen only partial credits, or the credits were listed erroneously as a “previous balance due immediately.” Meanwhile, Community Solar providers have been unable to send their monthly bills to customers or even sign up new customers.
This unwelcomed pause has been a hardship for those companies in what should be a clean energy economy ripe for growth. One official from a Community Solar provider lamented that his company has essentially been blocked from adding hundreds of additional customers it wanted.
It’s bad enough that as ComEd stumbles through this debacle it’s also arguing to state regulators that it somehow deserves a $1.1 billion, four-year rate hike. But even worse, CUB has discovered that ComEd proposes spending another $29.5 million on IT-related costs in response to the billing problems. A portion of the money (plus interest) would be recovered from customers in the latest rate-hike request, and the rest in decades to come.
CUB has filed testimony calling on regulators to reject any attempt by ComEd to force customers to pay a single penny extra for the billing fix.
ComEd now says it will begin reimbursing Community Solar customers for the lost credits in July. We can only hope that’s true, but after four months of waiting, we’re not holding our breath.
One thing we do know for sure is this is ComEd’s mess to fix–immediately, and with no more financial burden for their customers. Charging us to redo a supposed system “upgrade” that ComEd botched is simply adding insult to injury.
Sarah Moskowitz started at CUB in the summer of 2000 and became Executive Director in the summer of 2023. She leads the organization’s efforts to identify equitable and consumer-friendly climate solutions while advocating for consumer protections and lower utility bills in Springfield, at the Illinois Commerce Commission and in the courts. Sarah has served in a variety of roles during her years at CUB, from counseling individual consumers with utility complaints to building CUB’s outreach program into a national leader that staffs hundreds of free events a year showing people how to reduce their costs. She was promoted to Deputy Director in 2019, before, in 2023, becoming CUB’s fourth executive director. Sarah earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Chicago. When she’s not working as a consumer advocate, Sarah enjoys keeping tabs on the urban wildlife in her neighborhood, volunteer DJing at her local community radio station and reading history.
