A week without light due to the failure of an electricity marketer

Rafael and his partner have spent a Kafkaesque week due to human error, to which has been added the slow bureaucracy to which the electricity companies subject the consumer. “On March 31 our nightmare began,” explains Rafael Granados, a Cordovan who is preparing his doctoral thesis in Chemical Engineering at the Ciudad Real Campus of the University of Castilla-La Mancha.

That day Rafael got up at 7 in the morning to go to work in a laboratory but found that the rental house where he lives had no electricity. «The first thing I thought was that it was a fault in the electrical panel, but seeing that everything was fine, I wanted to check if the neighbors and the community had electricity. Flashlight in hand, I woke up my partner and we decided to call the electricity marketer, Naturgy». The operator asked them for the data of the owner of the flat and the CUPS (Universal Code of Point of Supply), a key of about twenty digits necessary to certify the energy supply that appears on the bill.

Their surprise was enormous when the operator explained to them that the name provided did not coincide with the CUPS and that the removal of their electricity contract had been processed. When the owner of the apartment was alerted, he received in response that on March 30 a citizen had gone to the Naturgy office in Ciudad Real to turn off the electricity in his home and that two things could have happened: either the CUPS he gave was wrong and, therefore, gave the one for Rafael’s home, or the Naturgy operator who entered the data made a mistake. “They even told us that these errors are common,” explains Rafael, who has been forced to live for a week at his parents’ house in Córdoba.

spoiled food

“All this has affected our routine. We are from another autonomous community, we had nowhere to stay while this was resolved and I have lost days of work. In addition, all our food has been wasted and someone will have to answer for the damage caused all these days, “complains Rafael, who decided to expose his problem in a Twitter thread, which helped consumer organizations such as OCU or Facua interested in your case. In addition, Unión Fenosa informed them that it had refused to reactivate the electricity contract due to errors in the data. Thus, the landlord decided to process a new contract that would allow them to have electricity again in a few days. Finally, on April 6, Rafael and his partner were able to return to their rented apartment with electricity now.

This has ended a “week of odyssey that we wanted to make public in the hope that it doesn’t happen to anyone else”, laments Rafael, who has not even been able to file a claim with Naturgy “because I don’t have a contract with them, so we We agree with the claim made by the owner. “What is clear is that what happened was a human error for not checking the data and now it’s time to deal with the claims hoping that we will be compensated for the damage caused,” says this chemical engineer who has felt like the protagonist of a black comedy.