Baltimore Gas and Electric raised customer bills to cover a $17.5 million contract for a Ford F-150 — a vehicle that state utility regulators at first said was worth about $100,000.

Regulators and consumer watchdogs sparred with BGE in late 2023 over the cost of the contract, filings with the Maryland Public Service Commission show.

The vehicle is specially outfitted to help minimize the risk of electrical shocks in public spaces, and, BGE argued, it is available from just one company that can essentially name its price.

The commission eventually approved BGE’s $17.5 million expense of an eight-year contract with the company, Atlanta-based Osmose Utilities Services Co.

The cost gets spread among BGE’s 1.3 million customers, where it’s negligible on utility bills. But with rising energy costs, consumer advocates and elected officials say these purchases add up.

Recent rate increases — tied to both escalating supply costs and delivery charges that sweep in expenses such as the truck and pricey construction projects — have outraged consumers who are struggling to keep up with their bills.

Baltimore-area residents have identified rising energy costs as a top concern, according to polling data from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County published this spring.

The expense for the vehicle, called a contact voltage remediation truck, helps save lives, BGE says. A two-person team, employed by Osmose, drives it around a nearly 1,700-mile coverage area to determine if any high electric fields are registered on the truck’s sensors.

BGE spokesman Richard Yost said last year’s annual survey detected 548 stray volts, or power faults that can lead to electrical shocks, not just from BGE supplies but from city and customer-owned equipment, too.

He said the annual contact voltage review, mandated by state regulatory requirements, necessitates the use of a vehicle due to the size of the survey area. And only one vendor, Yost said, has been approved by the commission to perform this work: Osmose.

Tori Leonard, a spokeswoman for the public service commission, disputed Yost’s assertion that it mandated the use of Osmose as BGE’s vendor, but acknowledged that only a few companies provide the voltage review service.

The state began requiring BGE to do annual contact voltage testing after the electrocution death in 2006 of 14-year-old Deanna Camille Green, the daughter of Baltimore Colts star Anthony ‘Bubba’ Green, in Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park during a softball game. Maryland is one of only a few states with reporting requirements for contact voltage incidents, according to Osmose.

BGE argued that the $17.5 million would cover the entirety of the service work, including the staff time — not just the truck. The review is conducted over 10 months during four 10-hour shifts a week, Yost said.

“While we have utilized Osmose to run this survey successfully,” Yost said, “we continually seek innovative ways to keep our community safe.”

Laura Wright, BGE’s vice president of technical services, told regulators that the company “understands that utilizing a sole source vendor is not optimal.”

“We are constantly seeking an alternative solution that may be more cost effective, but such a solution is not yet available,” she testified before the PSC in 2023.

The PSC reviewed the truck contract while BGE was making its overall case for its multiyear rate plan, which locks in a series of customer rate increases based on the utility company’s projected spending from 2024 to 2026.

The company told regulators that the truck is a necessary tool to satisfy state regulatory requirements to identify contact voltage in a large target area. And it told the PSC that it’s the only vendor with the technology that can detect contact voltage on a large scale.

The PSC approved the voltage truck contract as a set cost instead of one that’s financed over time to include fees and interest as BGE had requested. But it did allow BGE to finance just over $5 million.

Maryland People’s Counsel David S. Lapp, the state’s ratepayer advocate, said his office could not dispute the amount of the contract due to a lack of information, and he criticized BGE for a lack of transparency. He said it was unclear if the company considered any lower-cost alternatives than the Osmose car.

“It’s an illustration of BGE advancing proposals that increase its profits that aren’t justified by the facts,” Lapp said.

Financing the entirety of the truck contract as BGE sought to do would have cost ratepayers far more, Lapp said, so he considered the PSC’s split decision a win. He criticized BGE’s parent company, Exelon, for demanding “aggressive” investor targets that can only be met by increasing the company’s spending on things like equipment and technology.

Representatives from Osmose did not respond to requests for comment about the value of the truck.

BGE’s 2016 to 2023 contract, tendered originally with Power Survey, a company that Osmose later purchased, amounted to $15.6 million, Wright testified to the PSC.

The higher cost of the latest contract reflected a “newer truck” with “improved technology and capabilities” that would result in savings down the line, the company told regulators in late 2023.

The PSC determined that the company was not able to “quantify” the anticipated cost savings.

BGE representatives also told the PSC that a new eight-year, fixed contract would be more cost-effective than having to renegotiate an agreement more regularly. But regulators said the filing was deficient. They also said the company had failed to convey information about the truck’s reliability and safety. The PSC approved the contract anyway, as an operational expense.

Yost, the BGE spokesman, said the last eight-year contract for the vehicle was accepted as a capital cost, or one that’s financed over time, and was itemized as such in BGE’s first multiyear rate plan in 2020. He said that’s consistent with how other businesses account for that kind of purchase, and BGE considers it the “proper” way to handle the cost.

Stray voltage happens when an electric cable breaks down, causing a power fault and sometimes leading to the electrical charge of above-ground objects that it’s in contact with. In Deanna Green’s case, she made contact with an electrically charged metal fence in the outfield that had absorbed the charge from underground electrical infrastructure.

The truck’s equipment measures a property of voltage, an electric field, and when surveyors pull a high measurement they double-check the reading with a traditional volt meter that can be found at hardware stores. If stray voltage is found, BGE can start the repair process.

On its website, Osmose attributes the risk of shocks in places across the U.S. to an aging and deteriorating “global installed base of low-voltage, underground cable.” A single failure, the company said, can lead to not just electrocutions but power outages, manhole fires and underground explosions.

The faults, “undetectable” by visual inspection, require Osmose’s patented detection technology, the company says on its website.

The company says its mobile equipment has identified more than 200,000 low-voltage distribution system faults across North America and Europe, and can detect abnormalities from as much as 30 feet away while the truck is moving at speeds up to 25 mph.

BGE is projecting to spend $7.6 million this year on contact voltage remediation services, according to the company’s 2025 project list, which includes the cost of the inspection service, security costs and stand-by remediation crews that make simple or temporary repairs once contact voltage is detected, according to BGE.