NEW ORLEANS — Entergy customers’ bills might not hit the shockingly high prices they saw during last summer’s heatwave.
As The Times-Picayune reports, the reason people’s energy bills are likely to remain lower despite the continued sweltering heat is because natural gas prices are down from last year and could remain down for months, Entergy CEO Andrew Marsh said in a letter to investors back in April.
"Looking ahead for the rest of this summer, we anticipate that natural gas prices will remain at a much lower level," Entergy New Orleans' head of customer service, Sandra Diggs-Miller, said in the letter to investors.
According to the latest report from the Energy Information Administration, an increase in the natural gas surplus has helped drive down the price of gas, which is reflected in projected lower utility bills.
“The increased surplus of working natural gas stocks contributed to a lower price level for natural gas in the first half of 2023,” the EIA said in their report released last week.
“In 2022, large deficits to the five-year average contributed to high natural gas prices as the daily near-month futures price rose above $9.00 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) on several occasions last summer.”
According to The Times-Picayune, sample bills tracked by the Louisiana Public Service Commission showed that for a household using 1,000 kilowatt hours of electricity, the utility bill for June 2022 totaled about $145 with $50 of that bill going to the "fuel adjustment clause.”
In June of this year, sample bills tracked for the same amount of kilowatt hours per household used were about $124, with the fuel adjustment cost being about $20.
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