EDF, Engie, Total… Energy suppliers decide to automatically increase their customers’ electricity bills. The latter only have a few days to oppose this increase.
Your next electricity bill may be much higher than those of previous months. But for once, inflation has nothing to do with it. No increase in electricity prices on the world or French market is to be deplored. No, this time it is your energy supplier who is directly responsible for the increase in the amount of your bill.
Indeed, in France, most households pay their electricity bill monthly. In short, they pay a fixed amount for 11 months, before regularization occurs at the end of the 12th month. Depending on their electricity consumption, two scenarios are possible.
In the first case, households have to pay a supplement because their monthly payments were not sufficient to pay their entire electricity bill. In the second case, households benefit from a reimbursement of the overpayment by their energy supplier since the sum of their monthly payments was too high compared to the amount of their bill. However, it should be noted that most households in France are often in the first situation.
In general, it is the customer who decides himself the amount of the monthly payment paid each month to his energy supplier. Thus, he can manage his budget knowing that each month a certain amount will be deducted. However, once a year suppliers such as TotalEnergies, EDF or Engie may decide to reassess the amount of this monthly payment upwards. Based on the energy consumption of the last months, they raise the monthly bill to prevent the regularization requested from the customer at the end of the year from being too high.
But this increase is made automatically, without the customer having previously requested it. Thus, by opening his mailbox, an Engie customer who had until then been paying 90 euros for electricity per month discovered a letter (in photo above) announcing that his next bills would be… 159 euros ! “Following a request from you, or the modification of the date of your meter reading, I have made an adjustment to your payment schedule”, we can read on the letter. The problem is that the client never made such a request.
In question, this new amount is calculated according to the customer’s energy consumption at the end of the winter period. Obviously this consumption is higher since in winter the heating is turned on more often. But that does not mean that the customer will not reduce their energy consumption in the months to come, with the return of spring.
Consequently, the new invoice amount will be applied, by default, from the month following the sending of the letter. The only way to avoid this: quickly contact your energy supplier to object to this new calculation. Without explicit refusal from the customer, the bill will increase.
