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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowOur guest this week is Brandi Davis-Handy, who in February was named president of AES Indiana. That’s the electricity utility for Marion County and portions of the greater Indianapolis area, serving more than 500,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers. Davis-Handy was promoted from her position as chief customer officer, and prior to that she spent much of her career at parent firm AES Corp. in communications and public relations roles.
That experience is entirely relevant to a major issue she now faces as president. In November, AES Indiana upgraded several customer-related systems that were at least a quarter of a century old. The complex operation hasn’t gone entirely as planned. At the height of the problems with the rollout, about 10% of the company’s customers were affected by billing issues—for example, being charged the wrong amount for service or not even receiving a bill. The fixes are ongoing despite the efforts of more than 400 people working on the project.
Davis-Handy’s goals as president include improving customer service and communication, as well as the reliability of service. In this episode of the IBJ Podcast, she discusses the problems with the upgrade. She outlines the challenges of trying to grow the business when it’s hemmed in by other electric utilities, as well as the company’s final push to eliminate coal as a source of energy for creating electricity. And she discusses growing up in the Indianapolis area with dreams of becoming the next Oprah Winfrey and pursuing a career in media.
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The upgrade project started in October not November. I got an EV and needed a meter installed in an existing meter base. After numerous calls and hours on the phone, after 4 weeks of no action, I filled a complaint with the IURC. Two days later, I was contacted and had a meter installed 4 days later. BUT, that meter was installed in mid-November and I have YET to receive a bill.
Over the last few months I and various neighbors have reported street lights out. Using the AES street light reporting page is worthless. I usually only get action after directly emailing the street light department, the director of the department, and the city street light coordinator. I suspect that the Web page reporting is broken because of the upgrade and is still not working.
Today I called AES to report a safety issue. The auto-attendant transferred me to dead air. After listing to nothing for several minutes, I called back and went through the normal customer service line. I was glad this wasn’t a life safety issue, because nobody was going to pick up. I reported this to the IURC because there seems no way to communicate these kinds problems directly to AES.
I am retired from IT in AES and maybe 15 years ago, they were talking about what these systems upgrades would cost and at the time the estimate was $10 million. I have no idea how that same upgrade could now cost $86 million. To have 400 people working on this upgrade is beyond insane. Having worked in IT for my entire career, part of that for a major health care system, I have never seen a system upgrade in that price range. I will admit that the old back end was a home grown IBM mainframe system, with lots of various systems tacked on. The CRM systems were tied to billing and GIS, and work order systems, so it was complicated. When Brandy mentioned multiple time zones, this is most likely because they outsourced this upgrade to some AES division a Brazil. So my guess Indianapolis is paying another division of AES to develop a system that will most likely be used by other AES divisions.
The IURC needs to give AES some real scrutiny. I also think that things are so bad at AES, we are lucky there has not been a major storm event since this upgrade started, because I think Indianapolis would have suffered from a company that literally could not respond because the computer systems are so screwed up at every level.
She never addressed the reason for the increase being to the base rate instead of the rate per kWh. The rate increase falls most heavily on the lowest income, most frugal users. Instead of incentivizing users to use their electricity efficiently, which a higher rate for usage would do, they hammer the people who can least afford an increase. I would like to hear how they rationalize that.
I went to one of the public meetings about the rate increase and the majority of the people were opposed to increasing the base rate. It seems more rational to charge more to those who use more. I have not read or heard any follow-up explaining why the IURC approved the increase.
I understand they need more money for improved infrastructure and resiliency, but I think they are going about getting it the wrong way.