Northwest Iowa — While the power and gas stayed on in most of northwest Iowa during the latest polar vortex, unofficially dubbed “Winter Storm Uri” February 13th through the 17th, you’d probably better brace yourself for your next utility bill as some impact is sure to be felt in our area.
MidAmerican Energy has told us they plan to spread out the impact of the higher natural gas prices over several months.
While the municipal natural gas providers, for the most part, have yet to provide concrete numbers, they are telling us how they plan to deal with the issue.
Hartley officials tell us a large share of their gas is purchased ahead-of-time. But supplemental spot purchases of gas during the five-day cold snap in February cost over three and a half times as much as for the entire gas supply in December and January combined. The Hartley City Council will decide how to handle the surge. They are looking at spreading it out as well.
Sioux Center Municipal Utilities also locked in a favorable price for much of that community’s natural gas use, but as other systems do, a portion of their gas must be purchased on the open market as well, and they say wholesale market prices of natural gas spiked to 100 times or more what they were earlier that week. In addition, individuals’ natural gas use was driven up due to the severe cold. They say their customers will ultimately feel the impact, but they will be reducing the significant impact this would have on their customers, allocating reserve funds to help cover part of the cost of this higher-priced natural gas.
If the entire cost of these weather-related expenses were passed on to customers, an average March 1 Sioux Center residential bill would see about a $90 increase on top of their normal natural gas costs for February, according to Sioux Center officials. Their decision to use some reserves reduces that average increase by about $40. They say all individual customers will be impacted differently, depending on their natural gas usage during February.
Rock Rapids Municipal Utilities Manager Jim Hoye says the situation will probably be similar in Rock Rapids, where they also pre-pay for some of their winter gas needs. But he says they need to purchase extra gas on the open market too, and at this time they do not know the total of their wholesale natural gas costs. He says once they have that figure, the Rock Rapids Utility Board of Trustees will assess how to cover these costs. Hoye says, of course, that all customers should expect an increase in their natural gas cost on the bill dated March 25th due to both higher usage and higher wholesale cost.
While many Southern US customers lost power, especially in Texas during the storm — there were SOME rolling blackouts in our area to help provide enough electricity so the grid would not collapse, but, according to Hoye, we were very lucky in northwest Iowa. Hoye says Rock Rapids Municipal Utilities and several other providers started their backup generators and auxiliary generation plants to shave off as much local usage as possible and keep the power on the grid for those people in areas of the country where power generation was not possible during the storm.
