ACT Feed-in Tariff Audit Could End With More Customer Refunds

Evoenergy have miscalculated a whole bunch of feed-in tariff credits.

We assume ACT solar installers already know that Evoenergy has had data problems, but we thought we’d take a look at what’s going on in case solar feed-in tariff schemes run into issues anywhere else.

In a surprisingly low-key story, local news outlets The RiotACT and The Canberra Times have been reporting on errors in the Evoenergy scheme that are likely to result in refunds to consumers (although if, as is likely, the errors lie in the other direction, both the government and the company say customers won’t be pursued over over-payments).

The problem isn’t apparently in metering, but in the combination of a complex scheme that paid different rates per kWh depending on system size; and in mistakes made when data was moved between systems.

And, as The RiotACT reported last week, the problems go back years. The ACT’s climate change minister Shane Rattenbury said problems with Evoenergy’s Small and Medium-scale Feed-in Tariff schemes (houses and warehouse-scale systems, respectively) were first raised by government officials in 2015, and the government has “since been working with Evoenergy to sort out the issues, which go back 10 years”.

In February, Rattenbury decided to put auditors in place (see this story in the Canberra Times). The auditors were asked to review every aspect of the feed-in tariff data – the costs of the scheme, premium rates paid, installed capacity, reimbursement payments to retailer ActewAGL, and the like.

Both The RiotACT and The Canberra Times (in this piece last week) carried assurances that customers won’t be out of pocket.

According to its media release, Evoenergy instituted an internal review in 2017 internal review. It found that:

“as data was migrated between its systems, additional checks were required to ensure the data was appropriately categorised (small, medium and large-scale generation) and also accurately captured the solar inverter make, model and capacity details”.

According to the company, the issues found in that review have now been resolved.

The way the Evoenergy tariffs worked, if a household system was given a medium-scale classification, it would be paid a higher rate. A friend of SolarQuotes tells us ABC Canberra reported the affected tariffs offered between 34 cents and 50 cents per kWh, if a customer signed up when the scheme was at its most generous. These days, the scheme’s been cut back to 8-17 cents per kWh depending on your retailer. (our general advice regarding ACT solar feed in tariffs is here).

We’ll wait with interest for the outcome of the audit. In the meantime, there’s a very important lesson we hope has already been adopted by electricity retailers everywhere: data quality matters, and the best way to ensure it is to minimise manual processes wherever possible.