(The customer charge and base amount) are fixed costs that we are required to collect money on for reading the meter, maintaining our system, paying our employees. |
It does look like, based on his particular history, that he has never used this much natural gas, so I have already asked our customer service representatives to send out a person to re-read his meter. |
It's certainly been a unique situation. |
The average residential customer can be seeing bills 50 percent or more higher. |
The timing was really unfortunate, because the cold weather moved in. And when you have snow and ice you can't move as quickly and safely as you want to. |
We are able to lower the gas cost significantly because wholesale prices have been coming down. |
We do know it will go down. We just don't know how much at this point. |
We had two back-to-back hurricanes and then Wilma happened as well, knocking out much of the Gulf of Mexico's natural gas production. |
We just track the market very closely. We don't have a magic formula. It's not a science. We just track the futures market and find the most reasonable supply available. We're more sensitive to the (natural gas) market. |
We've got maybe a few hundred (without gas) scattered in the two communities. Providing we can have access to homes to re-light pilots, we will have everyone back on today. |