Billing Practices During Public Safety Power Shutoffs

SDG&E Responds to Questions about Billing Practices During Public Safety Power Shutoffs

SDG&E understands that recent Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) during the month of October has some customers concerned after reviewing their estimated power usage on My Account, SDG&E’s portal to view your bill.

SDG&E is assuring its customers that we will not bill customers with estimated data when a customer’s service is shutoff for public safety. Regardless of the cause of the outage, SDG&E does not charge for power that customers do not use. In fact, after a PSPS outage, SDG&E’s process is to manually review the bills of those impacted by the outage to ensure complete accuracy.

SDG&E’s My Account tool is updated on a daily basis. If usage data is missing, My Account will automatically post estimated data for display purposes only based on the previous usage. Before bills are issued in the billing cycle, SDG&E’s billing team will reconcile bills with actual data before bills are sent out.

It’s also important to note that solar customers do not generate power during the course of their sustained outage unless they have a battery with islanding capabilities. That will also have an impact on usage charges for those customers that experienced an outage during the times solar generation peaks. 

SDG&E is encouraging customers to either call us at 1-800-411-7343 with questions or to wait until your bill cycle is close to ending to ensure bill amounts have been reconciled by our billing team and accurate usage is accounted for.