ISLAND Energy has said it will be refunding its gas customers with a single month’s standing charge – of around £12 – as a “gesture of goodwill” following the outage in October.
The payment, which will be made in the form of credit to each customer’s account, will be applied next month.
The utlility company says that one month’s standing charge for a customer is around £11.56.
Today’s announcement follows months of speculation as to how households affected during an Islandwide outage outage on 7 October – when around 4,000 customers found themselves without gas – would be compensated.
Chief executive of the Islands Energy Group, Jo Cox, said: “We have reviewed the best way to make a payment to all our customers in light of the service outage we experienced in October. This outage was caused by a process in our plant detecting a software error in one of our systems. In this situation the safety process enforces a shut down and stops our supply.
“As gas systems are relatively complex, they cannot be immediately reinstated, and proper processes must be followed to reintroduce supply. As a result of this supply outage, Island Energy will be refunding the standing charge for the month of October to customers as a gesture of goodwill.”
She continued: “As there is no requirement for energy companies in Jersey to have pre-agreed compensation schemes in place we have been working with our insurance company to ascertain whether we were covered for this event. Unfortunately, as it was a total loss of supply due to circumstances out of our control, the insurance company has confirmed that it will not be covered. We recognise that this is disappointing for our customers and are therefore committed to refunding the entire month of October, rather than just the period of the outage.”
She added that Island Energy has also been reviewing the disruption caused to commercial and business customers, who have been “assessed on a case-by-case basis”.
“Whilst all customers will receive the credit on their account, most businesses have insurance for this type of disruption and it has been proven that this is typically the best route to recover lost revenue.
“We would like to apologise once again to our customers for the disruption to the supply of gas in Jersey and thank them for bearing with us while we worked to restore supply and while we conducted our review.”
