Central MA Residents To Face High Heating Costs This Winter

Friday, October 10, 2014

Nicholas Handy, GoLocalWorcester Contributor

Regardless of how you heat your home this weekend, chances are you will have an unsettling feeling in your wallet.

As Central Massachusetts continues to plunge into fall and inches closer to winter, many are finding that because of a variety of shortages, many resources for heating homes are becoming scarcer and/or more expensive.

“It's going to be a very expensive winter," said Secretary of Environment and Energy Affairs Maeve Vallely Bartlett. "We are projecting that due to our constrained natural gas supply, that prices in New England will go up for the winter. With the extreme winter last year, people will see those costs reflected this year, and then if we continue to have extreme winters and a constrained energy supply, those costs will continue to go up.”

Natural gas, electricity, and wood are all expected to rise in price this winter. And while propane and heating oil prices are expected to go down in price compared to last year – where a combination of supply disruptions and one of the coldest winters on record drove prices up – they still remain quite high at $3.60 and $3.30 respectively.

Supply and Demand

The prices of heating sources often rely on three key factors: how cold the winter gets, the amount of supply, and the demand for each type of heating source.

Customers who use firewood to heat their homes are not only going to have to pay much more for their wood this year, but will also have a much harder time finding it. Many companies that sell firewood have taken to their websites to let their customers to buy early this year to ensure that quality product is available at a more reasonable price. Some companies are even staying away from selling firewood this year because the demand is much higher than this year’s supply.

“Sorry, but there seems to be a shortage of firewood this year due to lack of new construction,” said K & K Mulch and Loam in a post on their website. “What trees are being cut down are by and large being sent up north as wood chips to power electrical plants. The wood I have been able to buy is way too expensive and I did not feel that customers would be willing to pay what I would have had to charge. I am hoping this changes for next year but for now I have no firewood for sale.”

The Natural Gas Impact

While the lack of natural gas in the North Eastern part of the United States will surely have an impact on those who use it to heat their homes this winter, natural gas is also going to raise the electricity prices, affecting not only those who use it to heat their homes, but all electricity customers this winter.

National Grid has already announced that they will be increasing their electricity prices by 37-percent this winter from the same time last week, meaning that the average household that spends $88 dollars will now be faced with an additional $33 on their bill.

While the price rises are certainly unwelcomed in any home, National Grid doesn’t have much of a choice, as much of the electricity that they generate utilizes natural gas.

“The unusually cold weather just exacerbated the flaws that already exist in New England’s energy infrastructure — flaws that keep our electricity prices here roughly 40 percent higher than the national average,” said John Chesto, Managing Editor of the Boston Business Journal, in a recent article. “One of those flaws is our overwhelming reliance on natural gas to generate electricity: On a normal day, more than half of our power comes from natural gas.”

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Central MA Residents To Face High Heating Costs This Winter

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