Wednesday March 12th 2025
Written by Local Democracy Reporter, Paul Kelly
An electricity bill error almost cost cash-strapped Scottish Borders Council an estimated £240k, it has emerged.
The council recently received an electricity bill for one million kilowatts of electricity used at one of its buildings.Based on the current UK average price of roughly 25 pence per kWh that would cost around £250,000.
But when the figure was flagged up on a new council database it was queried and it emerged that the actual electricity used in that building was 54,000 kilowatts, which would cost roughly £11,880.
When members of SBC’s decision-making Executive Committee met this week they received a report on an ambitious five-year programme to decarbonise and rationalise the council estate. As part of that process, data gathering has been improved with an asset dashboard created in-house, containing 600,000 pieces of inter-linked information within it.
The hope is that eventually the public will be given access to this dashboard to enable individuals to find out information about council buildings.
And as part of that data-driven process the anomaly in the electricity bill was uncovered.
Ray Cherry, SBC chief officer estates, explained: “I can give an example of some success from this.
“As part of this process we are gathering energy data for our buildings.
“We’ve always had that but not in one space linked to other information and just through that process an anomaly was found where we had been billed for a million kilowatts of electricity for a building.
“It turned out, and that figure stood out because it appeared on the graph, it turned out that it was an error by the electricity company in the billing and we were only supposed to be billed for 54,000 kilowatts.
“That’s not to say it would not have been picked up elsewhere but it has been picked up quicker as a result of this.”
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