Higher heating bills could be on the way

Bigger winter heating bills may be coming – or not.
The price of natural gas is totally about supply and demand, said Roger Warehime, general manager of the Owatonna Public Utilities.
“There are many factors,” said Warehime, including the futures market, the price of natural gas being paid outside of the U.S., the weather and what people perceive.
Last week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration announced that consumers should be ready to see their heating bills increase 30% for natural gas and as much as 54 percent for propane compared with last winter. The government also said this could be the most expensive natural gas heating winter in the Midwest since 2008-2009 if the forecast for a colder winter is correct.
“The supply and the demand completely depend on the weather,” Warehime said. If there isn’t an extended cold streak, he said, heating costs in 2022 could be less than 2021.
OPU customers will be paying the true-up costs from the February 2020 arctic blast through March 2022. The one-year payback was approved locally by the OPU Commission.
“We used over $8 million in natural gas. It was a year’s worth of natural gas in five days,“ Warehime said. And it would have been more, but the commercial and industrial customers responded quickly to calls about conservation.
Warehime said there is a run-up in futures pricing now. Contributing to that has been the shutdown from hurricanes and a hotter than usual summer. Additionally, European countries are paying six to seven times more for natural gas, leading suppliers to liquefy gas and ship it to those customers by tanker.
OPU energy conservation/marketing officer Jared Hendricks said he offers three recommendations (not in ranking order) for saving on natural gas:
·         Have the attic properly insulated and air sealed;
·         Have the furnace or boiler cleaned and tuned; and
·         Program a thermostat setback to reduce the temperature eight to 10 degrees while away during the day and at night while sleeping
“People ask me about using space heaters in their homes to keep the furnace from running as much,” said Hendricks. “This can be very costly if they turn on a space heater without making adjustments to the thermostat.
“Natural gas furnaces and boilers are very cost-effective. Space heaters are very expensive as they use a form of resistive electric heating,” he said. An effective way to use a space heater is to heat a small area, like an office, while turning down the thermostat for the rest of the house, allowing the rest of the house to cool down.
“Letting a house cool down reduces how fast the heat in the home is lost to the outdoor elements, which is why this can be a cost-effective way to use a space heater.
“To put costs into perceptive, if a person heated their home entirely with space heaters, it would cost them more than three times in electricity as they would have paid in natural gas running the furnace,” Hendricks said.