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The State Corporation Commission has approved Dominion Energy’s plans to provide an estimated $11 million to $12 million in refunds to as many as 24,000 commercial customers who may have been overcharged by the utility between July 2013 and June 2016, though the billing problems may go back further.

The company discovered last summer that “an identifiable population” of small and midsize commercial customers may not have had their meters properly reset to accurately measure peak demand, “resulting in the potential for those customers to have been over-billed for demand charges in a subsequent month or months,” Dominion wrote in an SCC filing in April.

The peak demand reading, which measures the largest amount of electricity required at any given moment in time, is used to calculate a portion of the bill for customers on certain rate schedules.

The problem, which Dominion says was limited to older meters that must be physically inspected, was the result of technicians failing to reset the demand function to zero and affected about 10 percent of the Virginia commercial customers in the company’s service territory.