We wait for liberal activists to call it 'big gas".
"Asked whether most people she knows understand their gas bill and why it may soon go up again, she replied: “I was a schoolteacher. So, of course I know how much they don’t know. But I do think a lot of us retired folks know it’s going to be worse than we expect.”
WASHINGTON, Pennsylvania—Janet Stechly, a retired schoolteacher, and her husband, a retired coal miner, pore over every monthly expense. One of the most confounding is the monthly natural gas bill for their small townhouse in southwestern Pennsylvania.
Their March bill from Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania totaled $95.17, but only $13.99 of that was for the gas itself. The other $81.18 covered delivery ($40.68) and a series of hard-to-decipher items including a “customer charge” ($20.15), “pass-through charges” ($13.37), and a “weather normalization adjustment” ($6.60) that was included because warm weather meant the Stechlys had used less gas than expected.
The retirees in this small town in western Pennsylvania will likely face even higher gas delivery charges in years to come as more power-hungry data centers are built in the region to accommodate the burgeoning era of AI. While public protests over higher electricity bills, water use, and noise caused by the buildout of data centers have erupted in several states, consumers are less aware of the effect on their natural gas bills.
. . . "As this family’s experience illustrates, increasing gas bills have nothing to do with the price of gas itself. Nationwide, the American Gas Association reports, actual fuel itself accounts for only 31% of the average bill. It is even lower for the Stechlys, who live in the most-drilled county in Pennsylvania. Washington County has 2,148 unconventional gas wells, more than any other county in the state. All told, they produced 1.15 trillion cubic feet of gas last year.
The price of the abundant commodity in this region is relatively low, and economists say it will remain so for some time. The expensive part is the plants, pipes, and wires that utilities install to serve new demand, and the companies recover those costs from every customer on the system with a guaranteed return, over decades, set by the state Public Utilities Commission (PUC). And those charges to consumers arrive whether or not the infrastructure is actually used to meet anticipated demand.
Like other utilities, Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania, which serves 445,000 customers in 26 counties, makes nothing on the gas itself; it buys the fuel and passes on the costs to ratepayers.
“Natural gas itself is completely unregulated. That’s the cheap part of it,” said Dale Nesbitt, president of ArrowHead Economics and a Stanford-trained economist who has modeled energy markets since 1974. “The pipe is regulated. That’s where you’re getting screwed. That’s where the fees are fixed.” . . . More.
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