First, the bad news: Expect to pay higher prices for natural gas this winter.
Now, the good news: The gas company is expecting a milder winter than last year's.
Combine those two pieces of information and it could spell relief for weary consumers in the Baltimore region who watched their heating bills double and triple last winter when extremely cold temperatures drove up demand and low storage levels sent prices soaring.
But that doesn't mean heating bills will drop drastically. It just means that if nature cooperates, you'll be fortunate enough to pay the same amount to keep warm this winter as you did last year.
Of course, if it gets colder than average, you could lose again.
"The glass is half-full or it's half-empty, depending on your perspective," said Mark Stultz, a spokesman for the Natural Gas Supply Association, an industry trade group. "That's good news, given what people were afraid of at the end of last year. There was big concern over the summer months about what would happen to the natural gas market this year."
Maryland utilities are taking the "half-full" approach.
In the Baltimore region, the average bill for residential customers for last winter's heating season - which started Nov. 1, 2002, and ended March 1 this year - was about $592, according to Baltimore Gas and Electric Co., which serves more than 600,000 customers in the area.
For this winter, BGE predicts that bills will be about $570 for the season.
"We're telling customers that they'll spend about what they did last year," said Wayne Harbaugh, BGE's manager for pricing and regulatory services. "I'm not in the weather forecasting business, but last winter was the fourth-coldest winter since BGE has been keeping records. It was 13 percent colder than normal.
"If you believe in fuzzy brown caterpillars or weather forecasters, we're expecting the winter to be normal. And if that happens, our customer consumption will go down," Harbaugh said. "We hope that's the case."
"We're still in a situation where we have a tight wholesale natural gas market," Stultz said. "So we're very vulnerable to Mother Nature. It's such a cliche, but our fate is in her hands."
Check the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center, and it will get as specific as, "temperatures and precipitation will vary this season, especially in the East."
