Market Alerts

Dear Suppliers,

Below are the notes from our Rhode Island Energy All-Supplier calls conducted on Wednesday, March 19,2024.

• 820 suppressed FAMP transaction error: Supplier have reported not receiving FAMP file for specific period. So far, we have discovered that the files that were being suppressed are files from 1/31/25. There are about 5 suppliers that were affected by this, and we are still investigating the root cause. Please note that although these files are being suppressed payments were still sent. Analysis is ongoing.
• We have noticed that a set of duplicate payments have been sent to some suppliers. We do have a workaround on how to resolve this issue and will provide more details. We are still working on what the root cause is and running queries to find other effected accounts. We did notice that these duplicate transactions happened in December.
• We have analyzed a variety of different accounts that were reported as having missing responses and we found that there are separate issues related to this. 
• As a reminder we continue to not suppress these transactions. One issue we uncovered is where the ESP Rate Code Value is missing. These enrollment transactions were accepted but the issue is that our system is not sending that ESP rate code value which is why ESG has been suppressing these responses. We are still investigating why our system is not inserting the supplier rate history but, in the meantime, we have given ESG the go-head to not suppress these transactions temporarily so that suppliers can start receiving responses. By doing that the response file will not contain the ESP rate code value. We have communicated to suppliers who were affected by this and provided a list of accounts with the accepted rates. ESG suppressed.
• 814C rate change request missing response. We do see the requests in our EDI portal. CSS did not process.
• Accepted rate changes processing issues. We have identified issues with processing accepted rate changes. Several suppliers submitted rate changes that were accepted via EDI; however, these changes were not processed in our customer service system (CSS). We are currently investigating how many other suppliers may be affected by this issue. 
• We have also created a separate defect to address the effected accounts. The problem was traced back to an unmatched table in our system, and we are actively working on a resolution. Additionally, we have created separate defects to address the affected accounts and have been running queries to identify any other accounts that may be impacted, aside from those reported by the suppliers. We plan to conduct a data repair for these accounts.  We are maintaining a running list to ensure we insert the correct table and prevent future issues. Moreover, we will ensure that the correct effective dates are inserted.
• We have been receiving duplicate requests for 814C rate changes, even after we have sent acceptance responses. Please remember that only one acceptance of a rate code per billing cycle is allowed. If a rate is submitted within a billing period, it will take effect at the start of that billing period; the same rule applies to bill option changes. Unfortunately, some suppliers have been sending duplicate requests for the same rate code within the same billing period, which has caused confusion in our system as we are accepting each request. To address this issue, we are developing a feature in our system that will automatically send a duplicate transaction rejection whenever this situation occurs.
• One thing to note is that as we continue to review these defects that have to do with no responses, rate changes, multiple pending price changes not being processed could be some downstream effects of some of the code changes we have done early on. Analysis is ongoing.
• POR Corrections: which is a separate POR issue 2022 POR rate was used for the first 10+ days instead of 2024. This was corrected on 8/30. We are aware that Suppliers were underpaid for this period. We are currently working on sending a list of accounts with the amount owed to the supplier where we calculated the difference between the POR paid vs the correct POR amount. We have already sent out these payments.
• We have received reports from suppliers regarding missing invoices for specific billing periods. This issue has been identified before, so we have added it back to our defect board to investigate the root cause. Most reports of missing invoices occur during the August-September timeframe. If anyone else has noticed any missing invoices, please send them to me so we can include them in our investigation.
• Data repairs: We continue to work on all the data repairs, and we have been able to close out a variety of different data repair defects on our board. For some of these accounts once of the data repairs are complete, we will need to cancel/rebill. Please also note that for some of these accounts it has taken longer to resolve because of some of what we call fallout accounts because of missing reads or related billing issues that require a service ticket so that our IT team can take a further look. These fallouts need to be manually reviewed to ensure that we have the correct information and gets fixed prior rebilling the account.
• No Bill accounts- Received multiple inquiries asking about status on accounts that have not billed. We have a backlog of no bill accounts that our back-office billing team have been working on. Some accounts have been challenging to fix but just now that we are working through the list and that this is top priority with the company.

Gas

• Capacity exempt accounts are not being accurately labeled in the 867HU transactions: Suppliers should see “EX” instead of “MX”. Capacity-exempt accounts (EX) are not subject to the mandatory assignment of gas capacity like our capacity-assigned accounts (MX). This has been deployed in our CSS system we are now working closely with Suppliers have received MU usage for FT1 showing read dates from 1st to the 4th of the month. We know what the root cause of this issue was, and it’s related to whenever an account receives a forced estimate. This affected FT1/FT2 accounts that were billed on the 4th and had incorrect tagging in the system as standard billing. We have a complex billing team working on fixing these accounts.

Kind Regards,
Rhode Island Energy Supplier Billing Team