A year later, Kansas approves plan for you to pay $366 million gas cost from frigid storm
Expect to pay an estimated $5 to $7 a month for five to 10 years for your share of $366 million in extra natural gas costs from the freeze last February, when temperatures plummeted and gas prices spiraled out of control.
A settlement approved by the Kansas Corporation Commission on Tuesday allows Kansas Gas Service to move forward with plans to issue bonds and spread the extraordinary costs from Winter Storm Uri onto the bills of 640,000 natural gas customers.
The cost per customer will depend on the terms KGS can get on the bonds, said KCC spokeswoman Linda Berry, but is estimated at $5 to $7 a month for years. It will be several months before the costs show up on monthly bills.
In voting for the settlement, which passed unanimously, KCC Chairman Dwight Keen said the commission, staff and the gas company have “tried to make the best we could out of a really lousy set of circumstances.”
He and other commissioners noted that although customers will have to pay the costs over time, the agreement includes provisions for refunds if money is recovered through ongoing investigations and lawsuits over potential market manipulation and price gouging during the freeze emergency.
The KCC has abandoned its own efforts to determine whether price gouging occurred.
Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt has said his office is looking into that and the tiny city of Mulberry in southeast Kansas has filed a civil lawsuit.
That could become a test case on whether gas prices on the spot market in February 2021 violated the Kansas Consumer Protection Act, which limits price increases on necessities of life during states of emergency.
Before the cold snap, gas was selling on the spot market around $3 per million British thermal units. Spot-market prices at the height of the vortex peaked at $622 for the same amount of gas, more than 200 times the price just a couple of weeks before.
Kansas Gas is the state’s dominant gas company serving most of the Wichita area and the Kansas City suburbs.
The commission in January approved a similar package to pay down about $88 million of extraordinary costs for the smaller Black Hills Energy natural gas system, which serves part of Wichita and the Lawrence area.
Those customers will pay off the extra costs from the 2021 freeze through a bill charge of $11.47 a month through January 2027.
This story was originally published February 8, 2022 at 12:49 PM.
