And many have complained that their electricity bills have increased. Could it be because of the newly increased Smart Meters? Well, according to the chairman, it has nothing to do with the meters or any scheme to gouge customers.
He says it is simply because of the increase in energy being used in warm months:
Lynn Young, Executive Chairman - BEL
"All the complaints that we have gotten and we looked at to start off with is that May was the hottest period in the year and every year we looked at the numbers and we can show you the graphs, etc. Every year we get a lot of high bill complaints because of the heat. Electricity use in Belize is driven a lot by heat. So your refrigerator is going to work harder, your fans are going to work harder, your AC units are going to work harder. And so, and then on top of that, what happened to some customers we found is that there's a threshold of $100 for GST. So if your bill was normally $95 and then because of the heat it jumped to $105, so you get an extra $10 on your bill because of the higher usage. But then you jump the threshold now and you get a 12.5% GST on that whole $105, which adds to it, right? There were also, that happens often in the industry, is that sometimes the meter reader goes to read a meter and cannot access the meter because of some issues or whatever, and they do an estimate billing. And sometimes that causes some disruptions, you know, variations. So if you get an estimate bill in, say, in February-like February, March, April were very cool months-you know, if you get an estimate based on those months and then May comes in high, then when the real bill comes in, you get a drop, right? And it tends to hit you hard. So then compared to the previous months, it looks kind of high."
"I'm just saying that all we can do is look at the data. We've investigated every instance that was brought to us. And in no case have we found that it was as a result of these new meters. And the meters are tested and we have the test results for them. So I'm pretty sure each person who has a high bill will have their own."
