Several factors could contribute to an expensive gas bill:

• Fuel prices

  You are viewing: Why My Gas Bill So High

• Changes in weather

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  Outdated or inefficient heating technology

Fuel prices

Across the country, houses are heated with natural gas, oil, propane, and electricity. In many parts of the country, natural gas is the most common fuel used to run furnaces in homes. Although the US is in the midst of a natural gas boom with relatively inexpensive gas coming from the Mid-Atlantic, the price of natural gas and your respective gas bills seems to keep increasing every winter.

In places like the Northeast, a large contributor to this trend is the electric sector shifting away from coal and towards more natural gas. Due to this cheap supply of natural gas throughout the year, natural gas recently overtook coal as the largest source of electricity generation nationwide, according to the Energy Information Administration. New England, in particular, is run largely on natural gas because every coal unit in the region has either already retired or announced a date in the near future by when they will shutter operations.

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This means that in the winter, when you need natural gas to heat your home, you might be competing for that natural gas against the electric power plants that also need the natural gas to run. As a result, your gas bill is so high due to the simplest economic principle: supply and demand.

Some regions are calling for an increased natural gas pipeline capacity to keep up with the rising demand. However, building a pipeline costs a significant amount of money, which eventually gets passed on to you as a homeowner through gas or electricity bills. Even though supply would increase, your baseline cost for gas may also increase throughout the rest of the year to pay for any additional pipeline capacity. (This is to say nothing of the local and global environmental impact of building new pipelines, which has been covered to great length elsewhere.)

Changes in the weather

The colder it is outside, the harder your heating system has to work to keep your home at a comfortable temperature, which means consuming more gas and spending more money to keep your home heated. Additionally, if you heat your home water supply using gas, colder outside temperatures may result in more warm water being used, thus increasing your gas usage even further.

Outdated or inefficient heating technology

All technology degrades over time, including home heating systems. As time passes, these technologies become less efficient and require more energy to produce the same amount of heat than they would have earlier. If you’re using an old gas-powered boiler or furnace to heat your home, the lower efficiencies will mean utilizing more gas, even if you’re keeping your thermostat at the same temperature as you have in the past.

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Category: WHY