That’s wholly dependent on how their billing system is set up.
Among a lot of other things, I deal with water utility billing, and the way we’re set up is that we may have one customer, but multiple meters. Someone who owns a bunch of houses and rents them out might be a good example. They pay one bill, but their bill is going to show separate reads for each meter, all totaled up.
So in our system, you’d be one customer with two meters/properties. Maybe it’s different for electric utilities though.
However, like everyone else in the thread, I’d be willing to bet that every electric utility in the country is using AMI meters at this point, so they can easily identify those that don’t have current flowing, and that’s what they’re calling “customers without power”, not the actual number of entities receiving bills who aren’t receiving power at all.
That’s wholly dependent on how their billing system is set up.
Among a lot of other things, I deal with water utility billing, and the way we’re set up is that we may have one customer, but multiple meters. Someone who owns a bunch of houses and rents them out might be a good example. They pay one bill, but their bill is going to show separate reads for each meter, all totaled up.
So in our system, you’d be one customer with two meters/properties. Maybe it’s different for electric utilities though.
However, like everyone else in the thread, I’d be willing to bet that every electric utility in the country is using AMI meters at this point, so they can easily identify those that don’t have current flowing, and that’s what they’re calling “customers without power”, not the actual number of entities receiving bills who aren’t receiving power at all.
Around here, we’ve got three entities involved - we’ve got the generation outfits- wind farms, nuclear plants, natural gas plants, and so forth. We’ve also got retail electric providers- who actually sets retail rates and bills end users. And finally, we’ve got the local power delivery utilities, who do the actual line maintenance and repairs. The local power delivery utilities are regulated monopolies for a specified geographic area.
A utility company delivers your electricity to your home. Utility companies also install and maintain the electric infrastructure and respond to calls about outages and downed power lines. Consumers who don’t choose their own energy provider will receive service from their local utility. The utility company for Cleveland, OH residents is Cleveland Public Power.
An energy provider supplies the electricity that is delivered to your home. Popular energy providers available in Cleveland include Constellation and Public Power.
I may be missing something here, but in New York State, which has the same division of services, your home has only one utility and that’s the one with the meter. The utility gives the information to various providers you can sign up with from the meter that it installs, over the lines it’s also responsible for.
What are the other companies for? Think of them like stock futures. The companies contract with the utilities for bulk purchases over time. They then sell the power to customers at a fixed rate. But they don’t know the future and making a bet on what will happen. If that rate is too low and the utility raises prices, they go out of business. That happened all the time in the early days. If that rate is too high, customers can switch back to the utility. Lots of people think they can game the system. Few can.
We’ve never switched over because my expert wife doesn’t believe anybody can make this work in the long term. Your particular circumstances may be different. Read all the fine print.
The way ours works is that my area (Dallas) has Oncor as our power delivery utility (they’re more properly called "Transmission and Distribution Utilities or TDUs). We don’t get a choice- there’s an Oncor fee on my bill every month, and if the power goes out, I call Oncor.
I’ve got a company called “Energy Texas” as my retail electric provider. They’re who I pay, and they pay Oncor, and buy power on the wholesale market from generating utilities like Luminant, RWE, NRG, or other power generation utilities.
There’s no gaming it around here; there was a company (Griddy) that basically charged some nominal percentage fee above and beyond the wholesale rate, and their customers got absolutely hammered in the 2021 Texas winter storm when the wholesale rate shot through the roof. Most of us on some fixed rate plan paid our fixed rate, and the retail power providers were supposed to eat the difference. Those folks who were with Griddy were stuck paying crazy rates when it went over $9000/megawatt-hour.
Texas has a uniquely unregulated energy market, where customers can pick and choose their providers from about 220 private companies. …
Most of the time, that business model means the companies can pass down savings to their customers. But it comes at a risk — one neither the companies, nor their customers, were prepared for. …
Griddy, meanwhile, is pinning the blame on the state’s Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) for ordering that the energy price cap be raised to its maximum limit of $9 per kilowatt-hour after the storm.
All states have some equivalent of a PUC. They normally have public hearings setting rates, which are fixed for the period (one year here in NY). When disasters like this strike the utilities could appeal to their PUC for waivers or some other reimbursement.
Fixed rates have to kill some entity when prices skyrocket. In this case, customers got pinched. And they screamed so loud that even Austin heard them. Texas’ lack of regulation and refusal to interface with the other two national grids is spectacularly insane. Griddy is the classic example of examples of people trying to game the system. It went bankrupt instead. And now is fighting back in court.
No sane state would ever let this happen. Not that utilities have good reputations in general. Stories are legion. But still.
The utility company for some Cleveland residents is Cleveland Public Power (AKA Muni, from its older name Municipal Light and Power). For others, it’s Cleveland Electric Illuminating AKA The Illuminating Company AKA FirstEnergy. Houses even on the same block can be a mix of the two: Typically one company will have poles going down the central property line in the backs of the properties, while the other will have poles on the street. And prudent Clevelanders remember which of their neighbors use which company, in case there’s an extended outage from one of them and you absolutely need to do something that requires power.
There are always exceptions and outliers. International companies looked at nothing but the books when they bought up most of the utilities in New York and New England and then got staggered by the fact that they have to bow and scrape before the bureaucrats at each state’s PUC, every one of them with wildly different regulations.
Cleveland may be this exception. I did try to find who owns the actual meters, though, not just the lines. Since each is replacing them separately with smart meters each probably has separate ownership.