Chubu Electric Overcharges 5 M. Customers

Nagoya, Sept. 10 (Jiji Press)–Chubu Electric Power Co. said Thursday that its retail unit had overcharged more than 5 million customers for over two years due to cost calculation errors. The overcharges, found at Chubu Electric Power Miraiz Co., affected at least 5,009,000 customers, or about 57 pct of its total customer base. About half of the affected customers are households. Customers were overcharged a total of some 1.2 billion yen. The company plans to refund the excess charges but has not yet determined the timing and method. Chubu Electric has already been under fire for a series of scandals, including cherry-picking data on projected earthquake ground motion at its Hamaoka nuclear power plant in Shizuoka Prefecture and improperly billing decommissioning costs for reactors at the plant. Monthly overcharges were 10 yen for the average household and up to 152 yen for individually owned eateries and other businesses. Local governments paying for street light bills were also overcharged. The company set power generation costs higher than they actually were due to errors in calculating costs for revisions to power grid usage fees. The revisions were filed with the industry ministry in April 2024. At least four senior Chubu Electric officials at the time were aware that power generation costs had been overestimated by 1.7 billion yen as of January that year. In addition, another cost overestimation, totaling 1 billion yen, was discovered in June this year. At a press conference on Thursday, Chubu Electric Executive Officer Takashi Ota said that the company took no action for more than two years because it did not recognize the miscalculations as serious mistakes. On the same day, the industry ministry demanded that Chubu Electric Power Miraiz report on the incident and its measures to prevent a recurrence. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]