Alaska Electric Light and Power wants to go paperless.
The Juneau utility has asked the Regulatory Commission of Alaska to revise its tariff to give customers an e-billing option. Right now, the company is required to send each customer a paper bill through the mail once a month.
Spokeswoman Deb Ferriera says about 43 percent of AEL & P customers already use some form of electronic payment.
“Either Easy Pay, or e-check, or direct debit, or our third party credit card processing,” Ferriera says. “So our hope is that those customers will also want to go paperless and this will allow them to do that.”
Ferriera says there would be no additional charge to customers, who would only need to provide a valid email address to sign up for the service.
An e-billing statement looks exactly like a paper bill, but for security reasons Ferriera says AEL & P will not email them directly to customers.
“An email will be sent to the customer saying ‘Your most recent electric bill is now available to be viewed.’ And they’ll be directed to click on a link, and the link will take them to the secure side of our website where they’ll log in with a user ID and a password, and at that point they’ll be able to look at their bill,” says Ferriera.
The Regulatory Commission of Alaska is taking public comments on the proposal, due April 5th. AEL & P wants to start the service in mid-April.
