Iowa heating bills expected to moderate

Heating bills are expected to be lower this winter than last year for Eastern Iowans using propane and natural gas.

Deb Grooms, executive director of the Iowa Propane Gas Association in Des Moines, said fewer farmers needed to dry corn this year, which is expected to keep supplies plentiful.

'The nice warm fall that we had dried everything in the field,” Grooms said. 'A year ago, because it was such a late harvest, everyone in the upper Midwest was harvesting at the same time. Propane was going throughout the entire Midwest.

'This year, it was more of a region-by-region harvest and that helped in terms of propane supplies.”

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects propane prices to be 26 percent lower in the Midwest. Households are expected to spend 34 percent less on propane.

Last winter's frigid temperatures and wetter-than-normal crop harvest created propane shortages across dozens of states. This past summer, President Barack Obama signed into law the Reliable Home Heating Act, which aims to ensure delivery of heating fuel by loosening transportation regulations during state emergencies.

Ruth Comer, media relations manager at MidAmerican Energy in Des Moines, said natural gas prices this winter are expected to be lower than the 2013-2014 heating season.

'As of Jan. 6, we were seeing natural gas futures prices about 23 percent lower than at the same time last year,” Comer said. 'They also are below the five-year average and the 10-year average for winter season prices.”

Comer cautioned that the cost of natural gas is just one factor affecting monthly heating bills.

'A customer's bill also will depend on their usage, such as how they set their thermostat, and their usage will depend by and large on what kind of winter we have.”

Comer said the cost of natural gas is passed on to customers on a dollar-for-dollar basis without any markup. She said MidAmerican Energy's winter weather analysis has found that temperatures have been 1 percent colder than normal through the first week of January, but 10 percent warmer than the same period last year.

'Last winter was about 15 percent colder than normal,” Comer said. 'We set a record for natural gas consumption on Jan. 6, 2014. That was our peak use of natural gas by our customers.”

Justin Foss, a spokesman for Alliant Energy, agreed that the cost of natural gas is expected to be slightly less, but the average customer's bill will likely be unchanged from last year. Although there is a moratorium on electricity and natural gas cutoffs, Foss urged any customer falling behind on their bill to contact the utility sooner, rather than later, to arrange payments.