Janet Stechly, a retired schoolteacher, and her husband, a retired coal miner, pore over every monthly expense. One of the most confounding is the monthly natural gas bill for their small townhouse in southwestern Pennsylvania.
Their March bill from Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania totaled $95.17, but only $13.99 of that was for the gas itself. The other $81.18 covered delivery ($40.68) and a series of hard-to-decipher items including a “customer charge” ($20.15), “pass-through charges” ($13.37), and a “weather normalization adjustment” ($6.60) that was included because warm weather meant the Stechlys had used less gas than expected.
The retirees in this small town in western Pennsylvania will likely face even higher gas delivery charges in years to come as more power-hungry data centers are built in the region to accommodate the burgeoning era of AI. While public protests over higher electricity bills, water use, and noise caused by the buildout of data centers have erupted in several states, consumers are less aware of the effect on their natural gas bills.
Gas bills are expected to jump in Pennsylvania and other states because ratepayers cover the costs when utilities build new power plants and install pipes and other equipment, according to Arif Gasilov, who leads the energy regulatory practice at Gasilov Group. And this buildout is now gaining steam to produce the power that data centers will need. “The price increases related to some of that buildout will show up as delivery and demand charges on your gas bill and capacity charges on your electric bill,” he said.
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