Kate Shonk is a policy principal at Advanced Energy United.
As temperatures warm up across the country, one reminder of winter remains: the sting of high heating bills. This year, natural gas bills felt different. Volatile supply rates — coupled with unprecedented delivery costs on bills — made gas less economical than ever. Spot prices reached record highs this winter.
Fossil fuel prices have always been sensitive to domestic and global supply disruptions, but recent brutal cold, winter storms, and geopolitical conflicts have left families particularly vulnerable to high gas rates. This January, prices averaged $7.72/MMBtu, compared to $4.13/MMBtu at the same time in 2025. These price spikes impact both gas and electric supply rates, but while electric supply rates are made up of multiple fuel sources, including cheaper, cleaner resources, high gas prices are passed one-for-one onto gas customers’ bills.
What is less widely understood is that it is not just the fuel itself becoming more expensive. Delivery rates for gas, or the cost of the gas pipeline infrastructure, are now making up around two-thirds of customer gas bills. That means, even if winter storms become less extreme, and global conflicts are resolved, and gas fuel prices go down, customers will still see their bills climb due to costs of replacing and expanding piped gas to homes and businesses.
These two mounting pressures — volatile commodity prices and sharply rising pipeline costs — are occurring at a time when consumers are opting for cleaner, electric home appliances. Modern electric heat pumps operate more efficiently than gas, even in subzero temperatures. They provide reliable heating in the winter with a fraction of the energy used for fossil fuel and electric resistance systems. Heat pumps also double as uber-efficient air conditioners, meaning households that switch can also reduce their cooling costs during increasingly hot summers.
From an energy affordability perspective, the appeal of home electrification is growing stronger. While electricity prices are certainly impacted by fuel supply constraints, they tend to be more stable than natural gas. In fact, in 2025, gas bills increased roughly 60% faster than the rate of electric bills and four times faster than inflation. And there are many reasons to be optimistic; in the long-term, electric bills will begin to stabilize and eventually even go down. The same is not true for gas utilities, where market-based electrification will make the system less and less useful over time just as the price of pipelines and fuel skyrockets.
Fundamentally, we are paying for two competing systems; one of which (the electric grid) is the backbone of our modern economy, and the other (the pipeline gas network) will get edged out by better, cleaner, and less expensive products and services. The more we spend to prop up that expensive, aging and duplicative system, the more we throw our money away at a time when we can least afford it.
Fortunately, state policymakers can choose a different path, but they need to act soon before we sink billions more into a shrinking system.
First, they can help consumers switch to high-efficiency, high-performing electric appliances by lowering both the upfront cost of the technology and minimizing ongoing operational costs. Consumers who fully electrify can immediately stop paying a second monthly bill and all of the pipeline costs that they are charged regardless of how much energy they used. Federal rebates, including soon-to-be re-released home energy rebates, have expanded opportunities for electric technologies, such as efficient heat pumps. State and utility-level programs, such as Colorado’s heat pump tax credits and utility rebates, can help close the remaining gap.
Providing support for low- and moderate-income households to access electrification is one step in the right direction. Beyond additional upfront state-level rebates for traditional forms of air and ground source heat pumps, states like New York are also piloting a new “plug-and-play” electric HVAC technology, the window heat pump. Window heat pumps are a more affordable and accessible way for all homes to receive clean and efficient heating and cooling. New York in particular is installing the technology in affordable, multifamily buildings, and the technology has seen high approval ratings from participants.
Programs like these allow renters to reduce their reliance on fossil fuel heating and receive affordable and comfortable heating.
Second, our elected and appointed leaders need to take a harder look at the dollars their utilities are spending on infrastructure. This means asking gas utilities to assess their pipeline projects for lower-cost options that may include repair, relining, or offering customers incentives for energy efficiency, demand management, electrification, or propane solutions and asking electric utilities to look for lower-cost options to meet load growth, like virtual power plants, efficiency, smart panels and thermostats, flexible interconnection, distribution system optimization software and equipment, etc. It also means requiring gas and electric utilities to coordinate their infrastructure investments so that they avoid over-investment, which drives bills up and wastes customer dollars, and under-investment, which threatens reliability, in either the gas or electric system.
Right-sizing utility capital expenditures, and leveraging innovative advanced energy solutions at the intersection of our gas and electric networks, can lower the delivery costs passed directly onto customer bills — all while helping states prepare the grid for an increasingly electrified future. Without the right planning, and without the programs or incentives available, households will have many more seasons of expensive winter heating bills ahead of them. We have the policy solutions and technologies for more affordable heat — the next step is implementing them.
