OGE price drop

[HarryBear]

Hmmm, must be from all of those bird killing windmills...

 

[John6185]

Speaking of utilities, we recently took an out of state trip and left our garage door opener with the neighbor. We were on the way home and she called and said we had water running out of our garage for two days-and then she got one of the neighbors to enter the garage and shut off the water.
We came home the next day and I turned the water on and found the leak, It was the copper tubing supplying water to the water heater. Usually our water bill is around $60 but this time it was $145.00.
I'm thankful we have the money to be able to pay our bills! Some people don't.

 

[JMD]

there never was a shortage of NG. just a shortage of electricity. and the utility having to pay extra for the greenhouse gasses above what they were allowed to use.

Oh yeah...carbon credits. Supposedly those are tradable also...what a bunch of BS

 

[crapsguy]

The local news talking heads reported a week or so ago that OGE was slashing monthly bills. Supposedly it was due to the price of natural gas dropping. I remember they reported large profits during the natural gas 'shortage' a year ago. I just looked through my chase bank account bill-pay history and realized that the cost of natural gas, reflected in my bill-pay payments, dropped back in May of this year. I use averaged billing for both gas and electric. If OGE was cutting the cost of electric service now because of natural gas prices shouldn't they have ot odropped the price back in May or June?

My averaged gas bill is normally about 60. At its highest it was 170! WTF! My electric bill is normally about 200, averaged. I use alot of electric, wife likes the house cold..and we got a pool pump that runs 12 hours a day during pool season. During the natural gas 'shortage' my electric is about 260, I just got my electric bill and it's 200. It's back to normal now.

This whole shortage thing seems like a scam to my dumb brain. Maybe I just dont understand commodity speculation.

the increase last year was due to a bad ice storm that screwed up alot of the NG system + some wind and solar generation -- the impact on OGE was a huge spike in NG that they had limited control over - that was a temp increase to pay that bill/loss. from what I understand this decrease is due to their being able to obtain better contracted NG supplies and likely was partly born out of the NG fiasco OGE is a good outfit and the corp commission watches them like a hawk

 

[SlugSlinger]

The real issue for the price increase is the poor planning by the utilities. They did not hedge the gas prices against a winter storm and had to pay spot market prices that are based on supply and demand. They higher the demand on the spot market, the higher the price.

ONG offers a locked in rate each year. They take that information and hedge against an unforeseen event. If you don’t participate in the locked price, you are assuming the risk of an unforeseen event.