In the spring of 2008, Dominion East Ohio (DEO) got out of the natural gas supply business. The utility only provides gas delivery services. The charge for residential delivery is presently $1.8204 per Mcf. It will climb to $2.96 in April in order to cover the cost of a program that allows low-income customers to pay only a portion of their bills.
You may buy your natural gas from another supplier and have it delivered by Dominion East Ohio. If you have not selected an alternative supplier, your gas supply was assigned to another company under the variable Standard Choice Offer (SCO). In this case, regardless of which supplier you are assigned, you are charged DEO’s SCO rate, which varies each month based on New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) month-end settlement price, plus a “Retail Price Adjustment” (RPA) of $1.40 (dropping to $1.20 in April). Based on recent NYMEX natural gas prices, for the period from May 20 to June 19, we expect the SCO rate might fall under $5.00 per Mcf.
Based on the information on the PUCO website, marketers are not offering one-year fixed rate contracts for less than $7.30 per Mcf. We recommend staying with DEO’s variable SCO rate if you have not locked in with another supplier. If you have an alternative supplier contract at a rate significantly higher than $6 per Mcf, and there is no early termination fee, you might want to consider returning to DEO. You would do this by contacting your supplier and telling them that you want to default back to DEO.
There is a 5-year fixed price offering shown on the PUCO website at a pricey $10.30970 per Mcf. We like the fact that marketers are offering multi-year contracts again. However, we want to see the price come down. In the meantime, we’ll keep an eye out for multi-year fixed rate contracts (hopefully 3 years or longer) at prices under $7 per Mcf.
