Sweden: Customers complain about slow electricity agreement changes

Customers have complained that Swedish state-owned energy company Vattenfall has been slow to arrange the change from hourly electricity price agreements to monthly agreements. Jonas Stenbeck, private customer manager at Vattenfall Försäljning, said that the change requests entail a big workload and that the situation became difficult when it came to resetting the electricity meters. The Swedish Energy Markets Inspectorate (Energimarknadsinspektionen, EI) has evaluated a supervisory matter where a customer was refused to switch back to monthly metering. Anna Carlén, analyst at the Inspectorate, said it was concluded that Vattenfall should let the customer switch back without a delay and that Vattenfall had no legal basis to apply hourly metering for this customer. She points out that Vattenfall's reference to increased administration and costs were insufficient reasons. Stenbeck said that the issue has now been sorted out. According to Carlén, the Inspectorate has received around 60 complaints from electricity customers who are dissatisfied with the way the electricity companies have handled contract changes. Just under 600 households of Swedish electricity grid operator Ellevio's customers in 2022 wanted to switch back to monthly agreements.