Tariqabad Division, IESCO’s special one?

ISLAMABAD: Residents of Tariqabad division, have your recent electricity bills given you a jolt like the rest of the country? If yes, here’s what you need to know about it. 

Electricity bills have multiple components, often very confusing, especially if you look into the maths behind it. Often we think that the distribution company (DISCO) has made an error and charged more than what is actually due. 

Profit collected data on billing to understand what happened with regard to fuel cost adjustments (FCA). While analysing the bills from different regions, an anomaly was discovered. Data collected from multiple bills showed that there was an anomaly in the FCA of the billing month of July in the Tariqabad division, which falls under the jurisdiction of Islamabad Electric Supply Company (IESCO).

To get a better understanding of what is being discussed, it is important to understand the concept behind FCA. Each month, if you view the breakdown of the total payable amount you will see “Fuel Cost Adjustment”; this is charged on a delayed basis to incorporate variations in the price of fuel used to produce electricity. 

For further elaboration, if you view the bill for July under the historic annual data provided, a single sentence reads: “Fuel Price Adjustment for May-22 @ 7.9040/KWH”. This is where the FCA calculation is derived from, multiplying the units consumed in the month of May by this rate will yield the amount of the adjustment cost.

However, this wasn’t the case for Tariqabad division. When the data was compiled by Profit, the figures did not check out. Digging into it further Profit learned that for the division, FCA charges included May as well as April whereas this was not the case in the other divisions or other regions.

It can clearly be seen from the summary of calculations that consumers from Lahore or from other divisions within Islamabad were only charged the accorded cost for May in the billing month of July. 

Whereas in the case of consumers from Tariqabad, looking at column “D”, all three consumers were apparently overcharged. 

There is, however, an explanation that came from IESCO. The utility company said that meter readings weren’t conducted due to Eid holidays and this is reflected in the bills where a section has been marked the particular month as “LK” or locked. 

Although the calculations check out for the most part except for the fact that if the FCA for April and May are added and then subtracted from the amount shown on the bill, it still leaves a difference of approximately Rs10 which has been underbilled. 

In the event that anyone wants to recheck their FCA numbers and understand how it has been charged, the process now should be easier.