BGE's November gas price: 96 cents
BGE has set the November commodity gas price: 96.34 cents per therm. This is slightly lower than the $1.599 that BGE Home, the less-regulated company owned by BGE parent Constellaton Energy, is charging people who lock in for the whole winter.
At my house we use about 100 therms per month in the winter. That's a difference of $64 a month between the BGE Home product and the standard, floating BGE price. Even if you're locked into the BGE Home deal, it's worth paying the $50 cancellation fee to get back to BGE's standard price.
Comments
I saw a report on WBAL that said natural gas prices would be 10 percent higher this winter. Hopefully, we can get by paying less than a dollar per therm.
Posted by: Peter | November 6, 2008 12:18 PM
Dear PSC,
This is in regard to my complaint against Commerce Energy, Inc., dispute # MPSC XXXXX-W
The basic dispute here is that they say they sent me a new contract for my approval and I never replied to that email. My contention is that I never received this contract. They then sent me into a variable rate contract which resulted in me paying 3 or more times the fair market value for my energy. This amounts to price gouging in my view. I am the type of person that pays close attention to mail and contracts and bills. And though it may be possible, I find it highly unlikely that I would miss a contract and not return it in a timely manner. You can check my credit report, I have a very high credit rating and pay my bills on time to all of my creditors.
Then to make matters worse, after I realized that I was being taken advantage of by Commerce Energy, they made it practically impossible for me to contact them to discuss or cancel this contract or service. I can see why they would not want irate abused consumers to be able to contact them and cancel the exorbitant rates that they were charging them, since that would stop the money from coming in from the poor consumers they were fleecing. So I continued for days and days to hang on their 1-800 number phone line trying to get someone on their staff to answer the phone. Their website had no functionality incorporated in the site to allow consumers to cancel their bogus rate gouging. So I spent days and days, I mean hours each day, I am not talking 15 or 20 minutes here, I am talking 4 hours waiting on the phone to get someone to answer so I could cancel their service. At my current hourly rate of $ 65.00 an hour, if nothing else they owe me those hours back to me in payment for my lost time and productivity.
What I am asking for is to be reimbursed the difference between the rates they were charging me and either the rate I would have been paying if I had stayed with BGE, or the rate their alleged contract would have charged me. That only seems fair to me.
Posted by: Stephen Craig | December 1, 2008 4:01 PM