PA Utility’s Innovate Plan to Deliver Marcellus Gas to Customers
Although there’s a lot a cheap, abundant, and clean-burning natural gas being produced in Pennsylvania, there’s still a lot of customers who can’t burn it because of lack of pipelines through their neighborhoods. Natural gas prices currently are 61% less than fuel oil and 68% percent less than propane. But when it costs between $500,000 and $1 million a mile to install the pipelines to carry the gas–you need a lot of customers to sign up to make it work. Not everyone signs up at the beginning–some wait and see. So in places like the suburbs of Philadelphia where there’s a lot of people, it has still been a conundrum–a complex problem with no obvious solution. One of the utilities serving the Philly area, Peco, believes they have solved the problem. Peco has proposed a new formula to the Public Utility Commission (PUC) that will allow them to assume that 75% of their customers will sign up for gas over the next 20 years. The Peco plan will allow current customers to stretch the natgas hook-up fee across 20 years, radically changing the economics and lowering the hook-up price for customers–making it a no-brainer to make the change–now or in future years. Here’s the details of Peco’s plan…
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What can we divine by reading the tea leaves from the recent election outcome in New York State vis-à-vis the relative strength of the anti-drilling agenda in the Empire State? A casual reference to media reports gives one the impression that those opposed to drilling–particularly in the Southern Tier area of New York–are on the rise. Yet in head-to-head contests (at least in the Southern Tier) pro-drilling candidates have now beaten anti-drilling candidates over the span of two election cycles. We can’t find a single race of consequence (anything bigger than town board level) where a pro-drilling candidate lost! Does that portend good things for New York State and the future of drilling?…
Yesterday’s election was, by all accounts, historic. It was a complete and utter repudiation of Barack H. Obama and his aggressive socialist policies–there’s no denying that. Republicans picked up governorships in most states where they ran. The one cloud was, unfortunately, Pennsylvania where California environmentalist wacko Tom Steyer’s $10 million+ purchased the governorship for the hapless Democrat Tom Wolf. One bright spot in PA (we challenge you to find this news in your local newspaper today) is that Republicans picked up MORE seats in both the PA House and Senate. Which means unless Republicans cave, there will be no severance tax to shut down Marcellus drilling in the Keystone State–at least for the next few years. Whew. In New York, Republicans (beyond all belief) held on and improved their majority in the Senate. The NY Senate is the only firewall against legislative action to permanently stop fracking in the Empire State. Whew. And what’s this, New England moves Republican???…