Winter natural gas prices are same or lower than last year

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By Andi TenBarge
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – Hoosiers in Central and parts of Southern Indiana could be seeing flat or slightly lower heating bills than last winter according to projections released Tuesday by Vectren Energy and Citizens Energy Group.

Both companies said that – when normalized for weather – prices for the five-month heating season should be similar to last year.

Last winter, customers saw an increase in heating costs due to the harsh winter conditions.

“The abundant supply of natural gas in the U.S. is keeping the price of this clean-burning fuel stable,” said Carey Lykins, president of Citizens Energy Group, which serves customers in Indianapolis. “Natural gas prices are about 25 percent lower than they were in 2008.”

Natural gas bills are based on wholesale fuel prices plus delivery and administrative rates approved by the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission. Utility companies pass along increases and decreases in wholesale gas prices to customers.

Citizen customers should expect to pay about $607 from November through March with typical usage, as opposed to last winter when bills averaged $680.

Vectren customers in the company’s northern territory – which includes Central Indiana and Southern Indiana north of Louisville – can expect an average bill of $550 per month with normal usage. Last year’s cold winter left customers with average bills totaling $615 over five months.

“While Vectren has always used normal weather to project year-over-year winter bill comparisons, the bitter temperatures experienced in the winter months of last year were anything but normal, nearly 20 percent colder than normal in fact,” said Mike Roeder, president of Vectren North. “Although the market points to continued low, stable natural gas pricing for years to come, customers should still implement energy efficiency measures and find ways to use less natural gas to lower bills even further.”

Hannah Troyer is a reporter for TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

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1 COMMENT

  1. We’ve run some unique thermodynamic analysis on the winter season last year. It really correlated to usage, the temperatures were in fact bitter, so to speak, however the real tipping point on usage rates peaked when the atmospheric conditions presented increase wind passage around the structures most conductive elevation surface by directional approaches. The elemental conductivity was sometimes increased by densities more adapted for static convection, as well.
    Polar air masses with more conductive elemental balances than normally experienced in the United States for the time spans created by those incursions. Your buildings conductive factors transferred at a increased rate because of the elemental density, regardless of ambient temperatures. “Global climate migrations” and, exactly what we’ve been gathering information on. Vectren does offer some information on property landscaping one can manage to improve those numbers.
    In the Vanderburgh area the standout building needing the balanced climate scape is the New North High school profile. That took some rough wind incursion at the worse conditional timing.
    The buildings profile is opposite the solution to conductive heat loss under such conditions.
    Poor footprint application and design for winter season frontal incursions.

    The EVSC should engage Vectren for some advice on that, our analytics consortium also has some working solutions. The consultation from Vectren would most likely come at a more municipal cost factored balance and is part of a program they do, or used to offer anyway.
    Same things,only ours has more defined specifics per some tightened standards and span times.
    Some of the large riverfront structures had extensive loss rates as well.
    Vectren’s own building being one of those. One of our analytics consortiums EU fellows has a easy working solution to those incidents when the wind approaches and densities create unbalanced conductivity conditions.
    That system is down right ingenuous in how the alteration of the conductivity actually works.
    ” Can’t spill it yet.” He’ll make a billion bucks off that the first season its demonstrated. That Guy and his group, did some incredible, but simple research while developing the application. Love that stuff, its a working solution to large building energy management with climate migrations now incurred, and expected to increase well into the future.

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