Hefty heating bills leave some Philadelphians aghast

Sophie Alfonsi-Connaire spent much of January waiting in fear.

The 48-year-old Havertown woman had been aghast at the high cost of her early-winter heating bills, but she anticipated this latest bill would be the steepest one yet. It included the frigid days around Christmas, a bleak spot in an otherwise mild winter so far in the Philadelphia region.

“The heating bill keeps rising, even though I turn down my thermostat,” said Alfonsi-Connaire, who piles on blankets to stay warm while watching TV in the evenings, when the temperature drops. She’s started lowering her thermostat to 60 degrees to save money on heat. “We’re paying more money to get cold.”

Two weeks ago, she received the dreaded Peco bill: $483, an increase from the previous $410 bill she had paid just weeks earlier.

“I don’t know how we’ll pay for it,” said Alfonsi-Connaire, noting that she, a teacher, and her husband, who works for SEPTA, together make “decent” money. She can’t imagine, she added, how those with lower incomes are paying such high bills.

This winter has been wrought with anxiety for homeowners and renters. They are not only battling volatile price swings at the grocery store — even on typically cheap staples such as eggs, which skyrocketed in price — but they are also up against rising costs of heating their homes.

While a year of record inflation is partly to blame for soaring fuel costs, other factors are at play, too.

“It has to do with the global market and global events, including the effects of supply chain issues, and COVID production issues, and the war in Ukraine, and Europe and other countries moving off Russian oil,” said Matt Casale, environment campaigns director with the Public Interest Research Group. “All of that starts to drive the prices up to the point where it’s more expensive to heat our homes this winter than last winter.”

Regardless of how people heat their homes, they’re most likely seeing higher bills.

Peco’s 1.7 million electric customers in the Philadelphia region, as well as its 545,000 natural gas customers in the suburbs, are seeing higher bills due to geopolitical and supply issues, but also because of a colder-than-average December, which included those three days over Christmas when the average low was 12 degrees (about 20 degrees below the city’s average low for the month), spokesperson Greg Smore said.

Compared with last winter, people who use natural gas are expected to spend at least 25% more nationwide, while electric customers can expect to see a jump of about 11%.

“Those who are using fuel oil ... are seeing the most dramatic increases in price,” with the U.S. Energy Information Administration expecting costs to rise at least 45%, said Daniel Ciolkosz, associate research professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Pennsylvania State University. About 18% of households in the Northeast heat their homes with oil, making the region the country’s most dependent on the highly volatile fuel.

“But everything is up,” Ciolkosz added. “It’s just a matter of what [heat source] is up more.”

For some consumers, a higher heating bill means cuts elsewhere in their budget or less discretionary spending. For others, the consequences are more severe. Without aid, they won’t be able to pay the bill and afford other necessities.

On the fourth floor of a shiny new West Philadelphia office building on a recent Thursday morning, Mildred Bailey, 67, a retired city employee, helped residents get connected to utility-bill aid, including by helping them apply for the commonwealth’s Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which gives grants of up to $1,000 to low-income families.

She works as a volunteer with the nonprofit ACHIEVEability, which also serves as one of Philadelphia Gas Works’ Neighborhood Energy Centers.

At about a dozen centers across the city, customers can chat for free with an energy counselor about ways to afford their bills and receive weatherization training and other energy efficiency education. About half of the people coming into ACHIEVEability are inquiring about utility bills, organization officials said, though the biggest influx of such concerns comes in the summer when utilities get shut off if they go unpaid for too long. In Pennsylvania, it is illegal to shut off the utilities of low-income households between Dec. 1 and March 31. New Jersey has similar rules.

At the same time Bailey is helping others, she is taking a hit, too. A gas customer, she saw her December heating bill for her West Philadelphia apartment increase to more than $150 from about $70.

“I just try to do the best I can and pay it,” Bailey said, noting that she has been paying in installments.

Nyisha Chapman, PGW’s community partnerships manager, talks with some of its 500,000 customers over the phone and at events, and said phone calls inquiring about bills haven’t been exorbitantly high this winter, noting that PGW’s rates actually decreased slightly as of September. Calls have ebbed and flowed as they normally do, she said.

“When it’s a little warmer than normal, nobody calls because their bills are not going to be high. But when it’s colder than normal [such as in December, when there was the Christmas cold snap], people are going to call, because they see an increase in their bills,” Chapman said. “We don’t know what the January/ February trend is going to look like, but we know in December, the weather was 18 degrees outside.”

After receiving a nearly $530 Peco bill, more than double his average bill for a cold month, Thom Baxter, 69, is mulling converting his chimney into a wood-burning stove to heat his Havertown home. It would likely be an investment of thousands of dollars up front, he said, but one that would be worth it if it meant lower energy bills.

Meanwhile, Alfonsi-Connaire will continue the measures she’s taken for years: drying all laundry on racks, doing exclusively cold washes, running the dishwasher only when it’s at maximum capacity, and turning on as few lights as possible.

They were once steps she took to reduce her environmental impact, but now she’s motivated, too, by her personal finances.

Her most recent heating bill of nearly $500 represents a $200 to $300 increase, she said, over what she used to pay in a a typical winter month.

Her evenings spent swimming in blankets and sweaters in her 60-degree home make her reminisce about previous winters.

“We used to keep it at 70 during the day, 65 at night,” Alfonsi-Connaire said. “That was the life.”