Customers to receive adjusted power bills; prices drop by 6%

The first customers of the power utility Stredoslovenská Energetika (SSE) will receive their corrected bills including the new electricity prices in a few days, SSE officials told a news conference held in Bratislava on Tuesday, adding that the average prices for households will thus drop by 6 percent from 2016 and those for business entities by 3 percent. After making necessary system adjustments and re-calculating end-user prices, SSE started sending bills based on the new price decisions for most power suppliers issued by the Office for the Regulation of Network Industries (URSO). Following the re-calculation of these rates and the application of the new prices in the household segment, we expect a 6-percent decrease in the integrated price in total. The average integrated price will also go down for the business segment with the decline amounting to 3 percent," said Szilárd Mangult, the director of SSE's Commercial and Services Division. Households which have already obtained electricity bills for January and February will now receive corrected bills with the new prices valid as of January 1, 2017. SSE representatives specified that about 65,000 bills had to be corrected. "We will generate corrected bills automatically. We'll start sending them to business entities, which will be followed by households," said Mangult. Customers will find sums of new advance payments in the revised bills. Potential differences that might have arisen since the beginning of the year will be regarded in these bills. Households that have not yet obtained invoices will get them with the correct prices. The same applies to business entities and local governments receiving monthly invoices, i.e. the corrected invoices will be automatically issued to them. Meanwhile, SSE forecasts an increase in electricity prices in the future. "The period of electricity prices falling on the stock exchange for several years is already over. We can probably expect power prices to grow next year," said Schraml.