February gas bills brought big surprises for Kansas City, Shawnee Mission schools
It was a surprise when Kansas City officials opened the gas bill for February: $2.4 million.
That was the amount that the Kansas City Aviation Department owed a Texas-based provider of natural gas for February, a month in which a deep freeze gripped the Midwest and strained energy sources. The department operates Kansas City International Airport and the Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas didn’t sound pleased.
“We weren’t born yesterday,” Lucas said on Twitter, noting that the aviation department’s usual bill was $80,000, “so expect some further talks from here.”
A City Hall spokesman said Kansas City’s lawyers were researching options to fight the bill.
Shawnee Mission School District also got a steep bill from the same provider as Kansas City, Symmetry Energy Solutions: $1.6 million. That’s $1 million more than it usually spends for the entire year, according Russell Knapp, the district’s chief financial officer.
Like Kansas City, Knapp said he would look into the matter with Symmetry.
“Hopefully some good news can come from that but right now we owe $1.6 million,” Knapp told the school district board at its meeting Monday night.
Subzero temperatures that cascaded across the Midwest in the middle of February caused rolling electricity blackouts for about two days. Weather conditions created high demand for power and crippled power stations’ ability to generate electricity.
Spire Inc., the largest provider of natural gas for interior hearing and cooking in Missouri with 1.2 million customers, said price hikes were far higher than anticipated. Spire provides natural gas for Kansas City, St. Joseph, St. Louis and southwest Missouri.
Scott Weitzel, managing director of regulatory and legislative affairs for Spire, told the Missouri Public Service Commission on Tuesday that the last deep freeze from a polar vortex weather pattern in 2014 resulted in market gas prices in the range of $40 to $50 per decatherm, the unit of measurement for natural gas. That was up from the usual price in the range of $2 to $3 per decatherm.
“We thought those there the highest prices we’d seen or would get to,” Weitzel said.
During the February energy crisis, prices grew to the $200 to $600 decatherm range.
If Spire customers saw higher bills in February, that was not because their rates for natural gas increased, but because they used more energy as a result of the colder weather.
Scott Carter, president of Spire in Missouri, said February was 35% colder than a usual February. As a result, customer bills for the month were about 25% higher.
And while Spire rates did not change, the company did have to buy natural gas in the market at expensive rates when its usual gas marketers were not able to transport natural gas on Spire’s system.
To recover its costs, Spire sent bills, with penalties, to the marketers that did not provide gas. For the February freeze, that balance was about $195 million.
Carter said Spire is working to recover that amount. Any amount that it can’t recover could factor into future customer bills.
Carter said it’s too early to know what impact that could have on gas bills.
“What we’re doing now is doing everything we can to mitigate that impact for our customers, find offsets and then also try to spread that out over time,” Carter said.
