Customers Brace For Higher Heating Bills

This AP article describes how the anticipation of higher natural gas and heating oil prices this winter has induced more customers than usual to opt for fixed-bill spreading of their winter fuel costs across a year’s bills. Someone should do a study of these moves and tie it to estimates of customer price elasticity of demand, for natural gas, heating oil, and electricity.

Although I’ve heard that we have quite a lot of heating oil in storage, so customers in the Northeast (who disproportionately rely on heating oil) are only in for high prices if they have a really cold winter.