What is Piedmont Natural Gas doing to help?

With the tight balance that exists between natural gas supply and demand, wholesale natural gas prices have remained high in markets across the country.

High prices place a hardship on all natural gas customers and reduce the competitiveness of American businesses. That is why Piedmont continues to partner with its customers to ensure that supplies are adequate and that energy costs remain as low as possible.

To further ensure that customers receive the most value for their natural gas service, Piedmont is committed to providing a “best-in-class” level of customer service.

Best-in-Class Customer Service

To better serve customers, Piedmont Natural Gas has…

  • Increased Customer Contact Center staffing by more than 35 percent, and recruited additional staff to help during peak call times at all three Customer Contact centers
  • Extended Customer Contact Center hours on Sundays from noon until 5pm beginning October 15th for the fall and winter seasons
  • Enhanced our Customer Information System to more easily obtain customer data while handling customer calls
  • Doubled the call capacity of our Customer Contact Centers
  • Expanded our customer self-service options
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Customer Self-Service Features

Piedmont has added a number of new customer self-service features at both www.piedmontng.com and www.nashvillegas.com. On both sites you can…

  • View a one-year history of your account, including bill amount, quantity of natural gas used, average temperature and number of days in the billing period
  • Find conservation tips, learn how to lower future bills and read what Piedmont is doing to lower bills
  • Enroll in bank draft or change your bank draft information
  • Enroll in the equal Payment Plan
  • Request a payment arrangement
  • Start and stop natural gas service
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Equal Payment Plan

We encourage all of our customers to enroll in EPP via our websites or our Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. Here’s how it works:

  • Piedmont’s EPP allows customers to spread their natural gas costs over a full year.
  • There is no charge to enroll or sign up for EPP.
  • Customers are billed a set amount, based on previous billing history, for 11 months with a “settle-up” period in the 12th month.
  • Actual gas consumption is still shown on the customer’s bill.
  • At settle-up, refunds or credits are given to customers who have overpaid relative to their actual gas consumption. Balances are due from customers who have underpaid relative to their actual gas consumption.
Interested? Click here to enroll
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Conservation

When it comes to conservation, a little can go a long way. That’s why we encourage our customers to conserve with a few simple steps. Steps like turning the thermostat back a few degrees, or having your furnace checked to make sure it’s operating as efficiently as it should be.

Alone, each step may only save a little. But together, they all add up to real savings. Plus, you’ll have the added peace of mind of knowing that you’re doing your part to manage your energy costs.

At Piedmont, we’re also taking steps to conserve. At each of our locations, we’re asking our employees to turn the thermostats down, to set water heater temperatures to “warm,” and to communicate with our customers the value of conservation.
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Keeping Prices Low

While Piedmont cannot control the wholesale price of natural gas, we pursue strategies that can help mitigate the impact of high wholesale prices on our customers. Some of the strategies include:

Storage – We purchase natural gas during the summer months, when market prices are typically lower, and store it in underground storage facilities or Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) facilities for use in the wintertime.

Hedging – We use financial tools such as hedging instruments that act as an insurance policy against extreme price swings in the wholesale natural gas market.

Supply Portfolio – Just as homeowners shop around, looking for the “best buy” for what they need, we obtain our gas supplies from a variety of sources under a variety of contract terms. We’re also adding geographical diversity to our supply mix as well in order to access natural gas sources outside the Gulf of Mexico.
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Access to Supply

After five years of high and volatile wholesale natural gas prices, it is easy to understand why the recent decline in the price of natural gas is such welcome news. After all, more than 68 million homes and businesses in America have come to depend on clean-burning, reliable natural gas for their homes or businesses. It meets fully one-fourth of this country’s energy needs and is an abundant, domestic energy source whose production and delivery, unlike crude oil, is not dependent on unstable foreign countries.

Unfortunately, we still have a problem

Natural gas production is not keeping up with natural gas demand. As this country’s existing natural gas supply areas mature, production from those areas is leveling off and will ultimately decline. Add severe weather events - like Hurricanes Katrina and Rita - that disrupt production, or extreme summer or winter temperatures, and prices increase sharply as the demand for natural gas exceeds available supply. With demand for natural gas expected to increase by more than 20% over the next twenty years, the problem will expand and the impact on consumers will magnify unless corrective action is taken soon

Who bears the burden of sharply higher natural gas prices? We all do. Last winter, gas customers faced economic hardships as a result of extremely high monthly heating bills. Particularly hard hit were low-income families and the elderly. Businesses suffered too. Rising wholesale natural gas costs forced companies to lay-off workers or to export jobs overseas where the cost of natural gas is often significantly lower than in this country.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are solutions.

Although our company and the natural gas industry promote energy conservation and our customers are listening and taking action, conservation by itself isn’t enough. We need to open up new sources of domestic natural gas supply to meet the growth in demand. We have abundant supplies of natural gas here in this country on our Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) that could help meet demand growth and lower prices. But access to new OCS acreage is off limits because of outdated federal laws. In fact, the federal government itself estimates that 22 years worth of natural gas may be recoverable from the OCS where drilling is not currently allowed

There are currently two bills – one in the Senate and one in the House of Representatives – that would allow additional exploration and drilling for natural gas on the OCS. The House bill would open up a much larger area than would the Senate bill. In both cases, exploration and drilling activity would take place beyond eyesight from any shoreline. With technology improvements in exploration and drilling no one need fear that harm will come to coastal-based tourism or to fishing and related industries. On the contrary, we have the ability to assure an adequate, secure supply of one of the most clean-burning and environmentally friendly fuels available on the planet today – natural gas

It is time to let our elected federal officials know that we need adequate supplies of natural gas at affordable prices and that it is not in our economic interests, not in our energy security interests and not in our national security interests to keep these domestic sources of natural gas supply off the market. We ask for your help in advocating this message. Together we can secure access to domestic, clean-burning natural gas AND help lower energy bills for all Americans.

We encourage our customers to tell their elected representatives that they want a stable energy future, too. Click here to contact your elected officials.
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