More than $600 million in payment agreements at Hydro-Québec

Hydro-Québec has unpaid electricity bills for the first nine months of the year of $62 million, and payment agreements with its financially troubled customers amounting to $626 million.

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From yesterday until April 1, due to its winter freeze, Crown is no longer cutting electricity to families and businesses who can no longer pay their electric bill.

During the pandemic, this measure was rolled out over 17 months, from December 2019 to spring 2021. And Hydro-Québec didn’t finally start cracking down on payers again until May.

Since then, Crown has signed payment agreements with 127,000 customers; 180,000 if we look at the beginning of the year. Hydro-Quebec has also cut power to more than 3,600 homes and 860 businesses.

The question of “fairness”

He replied, “Our bundling strategies are varied and disruption of service is a last resort.” magazine Company spokeswoman Sendrix Bouchard noted the importance of trying to recover amounts owed “in the interest of fairness” to all customers.

Compared to 2019, that is, before COVID-19 reached the soil of Quebec, this is a significant reduction in the number of blackouts.

That year, 55,400 residential customers and 6,800 commercial customers experienced outages between April and October. The repayment agreements amounted to $690 million after 10 months.

According to the data provided to magazineHydro-Québec estimates bad debt expenditures for the months from January to September at $62 million.

Also discounts

To this amount should be added the sales deductions for low-income families of $9.6 million. So the losses came after three quarters of $71.6 million, mainly due to unpaid bills. Last year, Hydro-Quebec’s bad debt losses were $157 million per liquor, a record.

With the deduction amount for low-income families, the shortfall was $170.6 million.

In 2019, Hydro-Québec estimated the amount that businesses or residential customers did not pay at $97.6 million, including $11.4 million in deductions for low-income families.

In the first three quarters of 2021, Hydro-Québec reported profits of $2.44 billion, or $633 million more than the same period in 2020.

some numbers

• $62 million in bad debts
• 626 million dollars Valuable payment agreements with customers
• 180000 Payment arrangements
• $9.6 million In discounts for low-income families

Source: Hydro-Quebec

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