National Grid Rate Hike Approved: Brooklyn Gas Bills to Rise Around $10 Per Month

BROOKLYN, NY — Beginning Jan. 1, 2017, the average National Grid customer in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island will see their monthly gas bill increase between $9.30 and $9.40, thanks to a rate hike approved by state regulators Thursday.

Want more local news? Sign up here for Patch's daily newsletters and breaking news alerts from your NYC neighborhood.

According to the Department of Public Service (DPS), which approved the increase, the average National Grid residential customer will now pay $1,280 per year for natural gas — although that is down from $1,680 in 2007, due to falling gas prices, the DPS said.

A National Grid spokesperson said the average customer will pay $9.40 per month more under the rate hike. A DPS spokesperson said $9.29. It was unclear why they had two different estimates.

National Grid will use the approximately $343 million it reaps from the rate hike to hire 380 new workers, the DPS said, and to speed up the replacement and removal of 180 miles of "leak-prone pipe" in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

The funds will also be used for the "remediation of dozens of environmental sites" in NYC that National Grid is responsible for.

By 2018, your gas bill could go up even more, thanks to another surcharge approved by the DPS on Thursday. This surcharge will only go into effect, National Grid said, if the cost of the Gowanus Canal cleanup — a portion of which is the company's responsibility — passes $25 million.

While neither National Grid nor DPS offered an estimate of that surcharge, they both said it couldn't generate a cumulative sum that was more than 2 percent of the company's "aggregate revenues," in order to, as National Grid put it, "limit the impact on customers."

Not everyone agreed that the charge would be justified, however. In a joint statement, the AARP and Public Utility Law Project said National Grid was trying to charge customers with a clean-up cost that would eventually run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

"Shareholders should pay at least part of the bill for the anticipated superfund investigation and remediation costs," the statement read. "It’s simply not fair to impose its costs on current ratepayers.”

Lead image via Steven Depolo/Flickr