Thread: Gas South Bill - Explained

I got my natural gas bill today and of course it was too high. As I mentioned in a previous post, natural gas bills in Atlanta are made up of a few components:

1. Gas usage x rate
2. Tax
3. Atlanta Gas Light (AGL) pass-through charges
4. Customer Service fee (usually $5.95)



Basically, no matter what provider you choose, you'll at least have charges 1, 2 and 3. You might be able to get out of the customer service fee depending on your provider.

Your gas rate is dependent on your provider. Hopefully you picked a low rate (I locked in at $0.75 a few months ago). But the AGL pass through charges are the same regardless of your provider and they are based on your address. If you look at my bill, you'll see that my pass through charges were $54.84 last month. Not cheap.

Pass through charges are based on DDDC (Dedicated Design Day Capacity), which for me is 3.022. Basically, this is the measure of your estimated gas consumption on the coldest day of the year. For new homes, this is an estimate based on the size of your house and the houses around you (which didn't work out well for me, since I am mostly electric). This is also updated every year, usually around September. According to Atlanta Gas Light, the vast majority of this annual fee is collected in the winter months, usually across 3 or 4 bills. The pass through charges in the winter are generally much lower.

More information on AGL charges here: Link

And below is a spreadsheet (compressed) provided by AGL to calculate pass through charges by month. You'll see about $12 of it is fixed and the rest is based on your DDDC.

Hope this helps you understand your gas bill!