Sundre homeowners are seeing an increase in gas charges as a result of below normal temperatures across eastern North America over the last few months, causing a high demand for heating fuel.
The average homeowner's gas bill has increased by $80, according to Jim Hall, gas manager with the Town of Sundre.
Town officials haven't seen this kind of increase since 2008.
“The eastern side of North America from what I understood had really below normal temperatures, storms, winter blizzards,” said Hall.
The temperatures were below normal particularly in February and March, and the Maritimes were hit with - 40 C in the last week of March, he said.
“Typically they don't have those on an ongoing basis, so we usually cruise through that time no problem. But this year it took an extra hit so we're sending a lot more gas from our storage reserves in Alberta from our producers,” he explained.
“Typically we have enough storage in Alberta to keep things fine and dandy for Alberta temperatures. But when we start hitting those huge users of Toronto and the Maritimes, Quebec, Montreal, that's where the gas goes as well from Alberta.
“So all it is, is basically a huge consumption on their part and what that does is drive the price up for all utilities including ATCO and our little town system.”
Sundre consumers saw an increase of 90 cents per gigajoule on their January and February bills, and there will be another increase of $2.60 per gigajoule on the March bill.
This means the gas consumption rate for March's gas supply to homeowners will be $9.12 per gigajoule. According to Hall, in 2008 the rate was up to $12 per gigajoule.
He said it's a short-term trend and in the meantime people can choose to go on budget billing or scale back usage as best as they can.
“I would expect that in the end of April to May it should level out to its normal summer usage,” he said.
“This is just one of those one weather phenomenons that's really hammered the supply.”
He said propane prices have also increased.
“Those charges kind of follow natural gas, because when you pull the gases out, they're pulling those types of liquids out -- propanes, butanes, ethylenes -- so the more they pull out of those resources, they go up as well,” he explained.
“The only thing that's different is, in storage of natural gas it's ready to go and it's in storage so the prices there go up, but propane will follow suit as well because they're pulled from the same mediums.”
The Town of Sundre belongs to a cooperative of about 175 other small rural and urban areas that sell their own gas, and the gas is supplied by Gas Alberta, he said.
“It's not something that the town is making extra money on. We just have our costs that we produce,” he said.
“People should understand that we're not ATCO. The Town of Sundre people own their own gas department, so everything that they put back into is not going to an investor owned.”
