BEL explains apparent doubling of bill

By William Ysaguirre (Freelance Writer)

BELIZE CITY, Thurs. Nov. 5, 2026

   There’s been a considerable outcry from many Belize Electricity Ltd. customers who received a disproportionately high September bill, after the Public Utilities Commission authorized BEL to add a 5 percent Cost Of Power Adjustment (COPA) in August. Many customers complained that their bill seemed to have doubled inexplicably, as a result of the COPA adjustment.

   BEL general manager for finance and business support, Sean Fuller addressed these concerns and others when the company hosted an Energy Business Mixer on Tuesday night, November 3. Fuller said that in most cases the customer misread their bill, not noticing that the latest bill included the unpaid arrears from the previous month, which made the unpaid amount appear to be double their normal bill.

   “There’s a set of customers complaining that their bills have doubled, some say tripled, and some say they have seen quadruple bills. And every single case that we looked at, every single one” had an explanation, he said. “Most of that comes from the Independence service area. What transpired for two or three months, I believe, is that we were estimating the customers’ meters; because we had some contractual issues with the meter reader, the guys that actually visited the meters. So, we did in-office estimation of those meters. When we actually went out and started putting in the AMI meters for these customers and got the actual reading, not the estimated readings, you saw some customers’ bills spike, because we caught up on the readings that we estimated that weren’t accurate,” he noted.

   He went on to explain, “So, if your average consumption was actually 100 kilowatt-hours, and our estimate for some reason was 80 kilowatt-hours for 4 months, that’s 80 kilowatts we did not bill you. And so, when you get a subsequent month, you get a bill for 180 kilowatt-hours, when in fact it was only 100 that you consumed that month. We made up for the other 4 months.”

   Fuller further clarified, “But in addition to that, at least one of the banks, I understand, the time it takes between when you actually pay your bill online, and when it reaches your account can be 2 to 3 days, maybe even more sometimes. If during a period that you pay that it has not reached your account, you run your new bill, because you typically pay when the bill is due.”

   “Right around when you run your new bill, it will show up as an amount past due and the current bill, totaling the sum of the two of them. The customers just look at that bottom figure and think, ‘Oh, I owe $400, when my bill is normally $200 a month.’ On closer inspection, $200 is the amount past due, and only $200 is for the current month’s bill. The customer may have already paid the amount shown as past due; but due to the bank’s internal communication delays, the payment hasn’t reached the customer’s account yet,” he explained.