Should have installed Solar...

[Rick Law]

This lady should have installed solar power - it could cut down her electric bill a bit.

Erie (Pennsylvania) Times-News, Article: "Erie woman receives $284 billion electric bill"
Luckily, she doesn't have to pay the entire $284,460,000,000 immediately.  Her minimum payment for December was merely $28,156.

^{http://www.goerie.com/news/20171226/erie-woman-receives-284-billion-electric-bill}

[Red Squirrel]

Sounds like she's a Hydro One customer.

[rrinker]

 Hooray for sanity checks in software. It's physically impossible to use that much electricity on a typical 200 amp residential service.

 Not sure about a metro area like Erie, but here about 40 miles southeast of Erie where I'm at right now, there IS no local generation, it's all serviced via co-ops as it's quite a rural area, and the electricity is at LEAST twice the cost of what I pay at my house. Offsetting that somewhat, in the Winter anyway, is that my GF's parents have a gas well on their property so the gas is free. And on a night like tonight where it's 11F BEFORE factoring in the high winds, that's probably a good thing.

[Rick Law]

Hooray for sanity checks in software. It's physically impossible to use that much electricity on a typical 200 amp residential service.

 Not sure about a metro area like Erie, but here about 40 miles southeast of Erie where I'm at right now, there IS no local generation, it's all serviced via co-ops as it's quite a rural area, and the electricity is at LEAST twice the cost of what I pay at my house. Offsetting that somewhat, in the Winter anyway, is that my GF's parents have a gas well on their property so the gas is free. And on a night like tonight where it's 11F BEFORE factoring in the high winds, that's probably a good thing.

Besides how many Amps she can pull...  Consider that the whole US Economy is about $17 trillion dollars in a year.  $284 bn annualized is $3.4 trillion.  So her electric bill is 1/5 of all of the USA GDP, almost 3 times the GDP of Pennsylvania!

Yeah, sanity check...  Sanity check on received data, and on output data.  I suspect "defensive programming" concept is not known by too many kids with a a CS major.

[jmelson]

Hooray for sanity checks in software. It's physically impossible to use that much electricity on a typical 200 amp residential service.

200 A service?  Hell, if she had a 245 KV line with the 200 foot tall pylons brought into her house, she couldn't draw enough power to run up a bill like that on just one month!
Their software definitely needs to have some sanity checks in it.  If residential customer, AND monthly bill over $2000 in new usage, call supervisor!

Jon

[David Hess]

Wait until law enforcement uses her excessive power bill to get a no knock warrant to raid her house with a tactical team.  She must be running one hell of a grow operation.

[Mr. Scram]

200 A service?  Hell, if she had a 245 KV line with the 200 foot tall pylons brought into her house, she couldn't draw enough power to run up a bill like that on just one month!
Their software definitely needs to have some sanity checks in it.  If residential customer, AND monthly bill over $2000 in new usage, call supervisor!

Jon

The flip side of that is the system rejecting bills or accounts because it deems actual situations unlikely, or because people have been registered wrong. I'd rather thave exceptions like these than that reverse.

[rrinker]

 There are PLENTY of sanity assumptions that can be made without risking excessive false triggers. IE, maybe not flag a bill that is say 10X the maximum if the full load were drawn 24/7 for the entire bill period. But 100x, or 10000x - yeah there is ZERO chance that is not a mistake. Even just averages. If the customer's average bill is say $300/mo., perhaps not flag a $3000 bill, but $30k? $30m? Zero percent chance that is legitimate.
 And those smaller (relatively) mistakes generally don't make the news. Wonder how many of them there are?

[Mr. Scram]

There are PLENTY of sanity assumptions that can be made without risking excessive false triggers. IE, maybe not flag a bill that is say 10X the maximum if the full load were drawn 24/7 for the entire bill period. But 100x, or 10000x - yeah there is ZERO chance that is not a mistake. Even just averages. If the customer's average bill is say $300/mo., perhaps not flag a $3000 bill, but $30k? $30m? Zero percent chance that is legitimate.
 And those smaller (relatively) mistakes generally don't make the news. Wonder how many of them there are?

You assume the input for this check will always be sane and correct. That's where things fall apart.

Adding more complexity, more required data points and inherent additional errors isn't typically worth preventing a handful of issues like these. Call the company, explain issue, issue gets fixed. Not a problem.

[Red Squirrel]

Wait until law enforcement uses her excessive power bill to get a no knock warrant to raid her house with a tactical team.  She must be running one hell of a grow operation.

Hahaha I could totally see that happen in the states too.   

But yeah you'd think there would be sanity checks in the software.  Heck, that should be happening by default anyway, they need some way to monitor the grid to control generating stations for demand.  If one house is showing as using an insane amount of power then you'd think it would raise a flag when the rest of the grid does not appear to be delivering such power to the house.   Like if the output of the transformer is 80 amps and one house off that transformer is showing more than 80 then you know there is a problem somewhere, and that should raise a flag.  It could mean a faulty sensor, or other problem.

Of course they probably arn't this organized, there's probably like 5 different billing systems and 20 different monitoring systems, and they don't talk to each other.  I work in telecom and that's basically how it is, it's a mess.  There's also like 3 different time keeping systems for employees.  I have to enter my time twice!   The bigger a company, the more disorganized they are.

[Mr. Scram]

Hahaha I could totally see that happen in the states too.   

But yeah you'd think there would be sanity checks in the software.  Heck, that should be happening by default anyway, they need some way to monitor the grid to control generating stations for demand.  If one house is showing as using an insane amount of power then you'd think it would raise a flag when the rest of the grid does not appear to be delivering such power to the house.   Like if the output of the transformer is 80 amps and one house off that transformer is showing more than 80 then you know there is a problem somewhere, and that should raise a flag.  It could mean a faulty sensor, or other problem.

Of course they probably arn't this organized, there's probably like 5 different billing systems and 20 different monitoring systems, and they don't talk to each other.  I work in telecom and that's basically how it is, it's a mess.  There's also like 3 different time keeping systems for employees.  I have to enter my time twice!   The bigger a company, the more disorganized they are.

Exactly this. People seem to have a fairly romanticized idea about how homogenized these kinds of environments are. Even in quite small organisations there tends to be a lot of legacy stuff floating around and noise polluting the databases. These are huge organisations, often composed of all sorts of smaller companies which used to be separate entities. That means the infrastructure often is a mishmash of ill fitting and glued together pieces, in various states of disrepair, migration and being upgraded.

It's ironic how people underestimate the data that's collected about them and aggregated by governmental and third parties online, and how people overestimate the intergration of these system that have existed for decades or even centuries before the internet became a thing.