One of the more esoteric, yet significant charges on my ConEd bill is the Gas Delivery Adjustment charge. The Gas Delivery Adjustment rate is a charge added to each therm of gas delivered to my home by my utility, ConEd. The Gas Delivery Adjustment rate is decided by the New York Public Service Commission and one of the 4 charges that my gas delivery charge to more than 2. Considering that the cost to delivery gas to my home is about double the cost of my gas supply, it’s important to understand why.
In the chart below we can see that the gas delivery (green), gas delivery basic charge (yellow), Gas Delivery tax (brown), and Gas Delivery Rate Adjustment (red) consume a hefty part of my bill, and yours too!
So how is the Gas Delivery Adjustment rate calculated? Who the f knows? I’ll show you the trail I followed, that leads to nowhere.
At first, I started with the ConEd tariff website, as I watched the NY Jets implode yet again. What an insightful and consumer friendly page it is! First the tariff pages tells me that ConEd has nothing to do with the tariffs they collect and sends me off to the New York Public Service Commission. Rest assured, that any state agency in most any US state that has ‘public service’ in the name, is not doing any service for customers. In fact, in the case of the NYPSC, the customers seem to be the utilities.
The ConEd web team must have spent hours looking for useful content on the NYPSC website on tariffs, gave up, and decided to just link to the homepage – and so they did! After a bit of searching on the NYPSC site, eventually I find the gas tariff page – Natural Gas Tariffs | Department of Public Service (ny.gov), which leads me to the effective gas tariffs, which leads to a table of gas utilities in NYS, Public Inquiry: Search Options (ny.gov), where I find ConEdison. Now I click on a bunch of arcane regulatory cases and eventually find the golden ticket that explains my gas utility costs in utility lawyer speak – perhaps the most boring dialect in English. Of course, our rates are buried in a set of documents called ‘Leaves’, which leads me to my ‘effective rates‘
So now that I find where the Gas Delivery Adjustment rate is defined……I’m completely lost. But, after more time than I care to admit, finally, on page 202, section VIIa, I find the answer:
This explanation is the codified for the next 20 or so pages. One day I will go through the math, or try to, in order to reverse engineer my delivery adjustment. But not today.
Today I will summarize the Gas Delivery Adjustment Rate as an additional charge added to my gas delivery bill to cover variable costs in the utility business. The adjustment rates increases dramatically in winter and falls in summer. Note to self – use less gas in the winter if possible.
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