From the Dayton Business Journal:
...residents should prepare for a pricey winter, particularly if we have a hot summer. The Evansville, Ind.-based energy holding and delivery company warned that natural gas prices for this winter will be much greater than in past years.
...the demand for natural gas, once used primarily to heat homes, is increasing as electric companies turn from oil and coal to gas for energy production.
"A lot depends on what happens this summer: electric demands for air conditioning or hurricanes throwing off oil drilling in the Gulf (of Mexico) will increase the natural gas demand,"
Whereas customers paid between 20 cents and 30 cents per therm of natural gas in the 1990s, they're currently paying $1.30...
One relevant factor everyone knows but no one talks about: office buildings maintaining their heating & cooling temperatures. It has long baffled me that offices (at least large ones) never change their thermostats. I worked in D.C. one year and I can tell you one of the worst offenders has got to be the Federal Government. The Capitol is like 80 degrees in the winter and 60 in the summer. It's ridiculous.
We now know office comfort isn't free; we are actually paying for office HVAC costs with a higher residential bill. The more energy that offices use, the more we pay for it at home. If your office is an icebox in the summer and a sauna in the winter, you might want to bring it up at the next happy hour team-building diversity training workshop or whatever they're called these days.
1 comment:
Sadly many office building are controlled by companies that are not on-site. It's easier for them to lock the temperature in place and leave it there. When I worked in the Tri-State Building downtown, we had to keep the windows open througout winter because it would come close to 90.
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