Home heating oil prices top $6 a gallon; PSEG power charge also up

Home heating oil prices topped $6 a gallon on Long Island last week — just as cooler fall weather arrived and the winter heating season looms.

The average price for a gallon of heating oil on Long Island hit $6.07 a gallon for the week ending Nov. 7, the highest the price has been since May, when volatile energy markets sent the price soaring to $6.46 a gallon, according to state figures.

The Nov. 7 price was a 61% jump from a year ago, and a 7-cent increase in just a week. Long Island heating prices had stabilized under $6 since May, falling to as low as $4.94 in September.

Long Islanders aren’t the only ones paying those high prices. Across the upstate region, prices last week rose as high as $6.18 a gallon in the Upper Hudson region and the statewide figure was $6.04, a 68% jump from a year ago.

Lawrence Goldstein, director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation and a member of the National Petroleum Council, said heating oil customers should buckle up for more increases.

“Obviously a lot depends on the weather,” he said, but prices through the winter are "still going to be higher than their already high levels.”

The reason?

“It’s because inventories are 20% to 25% of what they normally are,” primarily across the Northeast, “and refining capacity is constrained,” said Goldstein, a resident of Setauket.

Goldstein and others have called on the federal government to increase funding to programs such as the federal Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which he noted had seen cuts of $4 billion in recent years.

“The government needs to step up and help some of these lower-income households,” he said. “There are going to be people who are going to have to make some very serious decisions that are going to be ugly,” he said, because prices for other commodities such as food are also spiking.

It’s not just heating oil customers who are paying higher November prices. PSEG Long Island announced Nov. 1 that it’s power supply charge jumped nearly 3% to 13.8 cents a kilowatt-hour. On a year-over-year basis, the November increase is a 21% jump from the 11.4 cents a kilowatt-hour power supply charge for last November.

PSEG spokeswoman Elizabeth Flagler said despite the increase, this November’s power supply charge reflected a decrease in the cost of natural gas compared with October.

But, she said, the power supply charge during the past several months was set “based on the best commodity price projections at the time. However, volatility in commodity prices during late summer/early fall resulted in an under recovery of power-supply charge costs that are recovered in subsequent months, including November,” hence the 2.85% increase.

The news isn’t all bad. National Grid, which supplies natural gas to more than 600,000 Long Island customers, reported its commodity price for most residential customers declined for the second month in a row, to 73.4 cents a therm, compared with a recent high of $1.08 in September. Natural gas prices have remained volatile through the year, but prices have fallen in recent months because of unusually warmer late-fall weather and its impact on global markets.

Customers who need help paying their electric bill can reach out to PSEG online or via phone at 1-800-490-0025.

National Grid customers can reach the company's help line at 800-930-5003, or online. 

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.