New WCEC Bill Offers More Information and Easy-to-Read Design

Starting this month, Wharton County Electric Cooperative bills will have a fresh new look offering more information on your energy consumption.

This new bill design was made possible by the completion of two WCEC projects that have been happening behind the scenes over recent months. First, updates to our metering system now allow us to collect and organize data more efficiently. Second, revisions to our tariff approved at November’s meeting of the Board of Directors have streamlined and consolidated calculations for the costs of purchased power.

On the new bills, you will notice that:

• In all rate classes, the Customer Charge is renamed Cost of Service Charge.
• In all rate classes, Generation Energy and TD Energy are combined into one rate, STEC Purchased Power.
• Billing adjustments have been revised to consolidate GCRF and TDCRF into one Power Cost Recover Factor (PCRF) adjustment across all rate classes.

Even though it may look different, all rates will remain the same with the exception of an increase in the Cost of Service Charge for Residential and Small General Service rate classes. (See notice here.)

Perhaps the most exciting addition to the new bill is more information on your energy usage. Recent updates to our metering software and hardware allow our meters to collect more data. This data is shared with you, our members, through your online account and our SmartHub app. You can now view daily and hourly energy consumption which can help pinpoint days and times to work on energy efficiency efforts.

We’re taking advantage of this technology and the data it collects and sharing it with you on the new bill. Usage graphs will show your monthly usage along with monthly high and low and temperature as well as usage comparisons with the previous month and the same month from last year.

We hope that this information will empower our members in making energy decisions in the future.

WCEC uses several different software platforms—dealing with billing, metering, outage management, member data management and more—that are integrated to share data between one another. Your WCEC Home Team worked with the providers of these platforms and each other to extract relevant data and present it to you in an easy-to-read format. From start to finish, the new bill design took several months to achieve, but we think it was worth the time and effort, and we hope you like it.

We value your opinion!

Please call our office at (979) 543-6271 with any questions, suggestions, or comments.

For details on the new bill design, click here or download the PDF below.

Features of the New Bill Design