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Billing dispute at energy-efficient home, solar panels working again

1 day 20 hours 28 minutes ago Tuesday, February 18 2025 Feb 18, 2025 February 18, 2025 8:23 PM February 18, 2025 in News
Source: WBRZ

BATON ROUGE - Nona Jones has taken measures to make her home more energy efficient. She has solar panels on her roof and recently installed new windows.

Jones had the solar panels installed in 2015 and they made a true difference to her energy consumption. Her Entergy bills were very low and sometimes she received a credit. Then, that stopped happening.

"My bill is really high and it shouldn't be," she said.

Jones can't pinpoint the date, but one month her Entergy bills started going up and now they're several hundred dollars each.

"The problem did not stem until they came out and they changed the set up of the meters," she said.

After calls to Entergy and visits by the company, no one was able to figure out what was wrong. The power company told her everything checked out on their end. Then, this week, Jones had another professional visit her home who did a thorough inspection of the panels and found that a breaker was turned off. Jones says when the meter was swapped out, the breaker to the panels was never turned back on.

"I've complained several times that something is just not right and no one could figure this out, no one that works for Entergy had the aptitude to come out here and say, 'Oh, it's not registering,'" she said.

Jones now knows that there are arrows on her Entergy meter that show her when her house is running on electric vs solar power.

Entergy says since Jones' breaker was off, the panels were not pushing power to the Entergy grid, and if a breaker or solar panel is on a customer's side of the meter, it's their responsibility to maintain.

Jones thinks a communication breakdown is to blame and thinks she should be credited for the lost energy. Entergy couldn't comment further and did not say whether it planned to investigate her situation further to find out when the problem started.

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