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I want to share some information about heating in this area with natural gas. I am comparing year-to-date costs for the last three years, at the end of March. The natural gas bills are rather complicated, so I will only show totals rather than breaking down cost the way the company does. These numbers reflect my own personal natural gas usage bill.
March 2022: $3,172.86 for 1,826 therms (heating oil wholesale: $3.78 per gallon).
March 2021: $1,818.44 for 1,746 therms (heating oil wholesale: $1.80 per gallon).
March 2020: $1,991.20 for 1,823 therms (heating oil wholesale: $1.10 per gallon).
Note: therm is a gas company description of a complicated magical set of calculations of measurement of the expanded (heating) value of the gas delivered to the gas meter.
While I am only talking about natural gas, part of the current price rise is due to shipping out natural gas to other countries due to the Russia sanctions, a bigger part of the increase is the residential competitor, the electricity producers using natural gas to power their generation equipment. These are the same people that won the vote to stop the electrical transmission corridor. So we natural gas users pay more for our natural gas in addition to our increased price for our electricity.
Karl Austin
Bucksport