Lysandria Power said on Saturday it would return €4.4 million (about $5.1 million) after a protest outside its Brussels headquarters brought stacks of customer bills and a previously unnoticed billing error to the company’s attention. The firm has stopped collecting its €6.40 monthly “price stability” fee while it checks accounts.
About 900 people gathered on Friday, 16 October, outside the supplier’s glass-fronted office near Brussels-North station. Organisers wheeled in 24,000 printed bill pages, stacked nearly 2.5 metres (8 feet) high, and said their comparison of household statements had found the same fee appearing twice after some meter replacements.
The bills that rang the alarm
The fee was introduced in 2024 as protection against volatile wholesale electricity prices. Lysandria says it bought power in advance to limit sudden changes to customer bills; its published accounts show the charge brought in €22.7 million last year. Protest organisers argued customers had been sold protection without a clear explanation of how much the arrangement cost or what happened to any surplus.
Denisa Gábor, who helped organise the demonstration, said a group of customers compared paper bills after noticing that their monthly totals rose despite a fall in the supplier’s advertised unit price. “We expected a confusing surcharge. We did not expect the same protection to be billed twice because someone changed a meter,” she said.
People brought their bills because they were tired of being told the numbers were too complicated to check.
Denisa Gábor, protest organiser
Lysandria chief executive Subhash K. Bose said the duplicate charge affected accounts moved during a 2024 billing-system upgrade. When a meter was replaced, some accounts retained the old meter record while opening a new one; the system then applied the fee to both. The company said the error did not affect energy consumption charges.
Bose said the company began testing accounts after staff spoke to demonstrators on Friday. By Saturday, it had identified 28,400 affected households, each due an average refund of €155. The company expects to contact customers directly and start repayments in November, with former customers included where it can verify their details.
Regulator demands a full count
Belgium’s national energy regulator said it had requested a breakdown of the affected accounts, the fee’s proceeds and the company’s refund timetable. It will decide whether to open a formal compliance case after reviewing the figures. The regulator can order suppliers to correct bills and impose penalties for breaches of consumer rules.
Energy-market analyst Zsombor Bakos-Juhász said the error was unusually visible because the charge appeared as a separate line on paper bills, but warned that a refund would not settle the wider dispute. “A fixed fee can smooth a volatile market, but customers must be able to see what they are paying for,” he said.
Lysandria says the fee will remain suspended until its account review is complete, though it has not ruled out bringing back a redesigned version. Protest organisers plan to meet the company next week and want the regulator to publish its findings. The bill tower was taken away on Friday; customers are still waiting to learn whether the surcharge will return.
