Catherine (Katherine) Blunt

speaker

106 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2022 last heard Sep 2022

Catherine (Katherine) Blunt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Power Bills Expected to Continue Climbing This Winter · 21 Sep 2022 podcast

in the winter when, of course, many people are burning natural gas to heat their homes and burning natural gas to create electricity.

So for that reason, power prices have gone up very considerably in New England and home heating costs are also going to go up this winter.

And of course, like many other regions, New England has been trying to develop a number of renewable energy projects to diversify the sorts of power generators that it relies on.

But a lot of those projects aren't operational yet and natural gas is still very much the dominant fuel used to produce power.

So they're not going to rise at the same rate uniformly across the board because every region has distinct challenges in this regard.

But in general, experts expect that customers should expect to see at least some increase in the amount they're paying for electricity as well as natural gas this winter.

Yeah, so there's a number of strategies they can deploy.

Of course, in purchasing natural gas, a lot of them have different sorts of hedging strategies to attempt to manage the price volatility that we're seeing right now.

There are some utilities that have some ability to store gas, which is helpful, but not all have that capability.

And then some utilities are trying to switch between fuels, depending on what's most economic at the time.

If they have a unit that could run on both coal and natural gas, maybe they switch between the two.

But in general...

We are seeing these commodity costs rise across the board.

So the effect of that, unfortunately, is somewhat limited.

And these costs are passed on to consumers.

So utilities are trying their best, but they are limited at the end of the day when you have such massive price increases across every fuel type.

communication is the number one thing.

I think they're trying to give consumers a heads up of when they should expect to see these substantial increases in terms of how much they're paying for either electricity or natural gas for home heating purposes.

They also have long lists of measures that customers can take to try to improve the energy efficiency of their homes.

Some of them have

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