After years of paying only around $20/month for her electricity, a woman in Seattle was recently hit with an electric bill worth 100 times that amount because the city’s power utility didn’t realize it had screwed up her meter four years earlier.

KOMOnews reports that the meter on the woman’s rented South Seattle home has been under-reporting her usage since June 2010. In all that time, neither the City Light utility company nor the meter reader who made regular visits to the property noticed anything was amiss.

And when City Light finally did realize there was a problem with the meter, it didn’t send the customer a notice explaining the issue and suggesting a payment plan. No, she just got a bill for $2,113.56 that she was supposed to pay in full by the end of the monthly billing period.

“That’s a lot of money,” says the tenant, “and a lot of money I don’t have.”

A rep for City Light tells KOMO that the figure was arrived at by averaging the previous use and then calculating what wasn’t collected over the time period during which the meter was under-reporting. Additionally, the company apparently can’t just say “our bad” and write off the debt, saying it is required by law to collect payment for any electricity used.

“If any one customer is not paying for the energy that the consumer uses, that shifts the cost to everyone else,” the City Light rep explains, adding that the customer should probably have known something was wrong when her bill was showing zero usage. Of course, one could argue that the meter reader should have noticed this lack of usage in an occupied home.

The company says it has offered to accept payment for the past bills through monthly installments of $88.07, but the tenant says even that will be an issue on her fixed income.

City Light is now trying to get the customer onto a discounted energy plan for low-income residents, but doesn’t know if it can apply that discount retroactively to bring down the total owed for the four years the meter was screwed up.

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