By Esteban Fernandez
For Times West Virginian
Fairmont — White Hall resident Vicki DeWitt saw her bill from Hope Gas double.
The culprit was the weather normalization adjustment fee Hope Gas began to pilot last year. However, what galls DeWitt is Hope Gas already seems to have a program that takes weather fluctuations into account. The utility company offers a budget payment plan, which calculates a monthly price based on either 12 months of usage history or estimated usage at a customer’s residence.
“The thing is, why? I’m on a budget, because of the winters and the summers,” DeWitt said. “So that to me, kind of rules out what they’re doing. If it’s colder, you pay more, and then they budget it in. So, it just doesn’t make a whole lot of real sense to me.”
DeWitt is not the only one who sees no sense in Hope’s weather normalization adjustment fee. Hope Gas implemented the fee as a way to balance how unusually warm or cold weather impacts natural gas usage. The fee uses a baseline composed from a 10-year average, and then looks to see if temperatures deviated more than 2% warmer or colder from that average. Depending on where the deviation is, the company can either increase a customer’s charge or give them a credit on their bill.
However, hundreds of Hope Gas customers accuse the company of using the adjustment fee as a cover for protecting their revenues for periods when customers use less gas than initially forecast. Over 100 letters of protest have been filed against the fee.
“We, however, find it ridiculous to have to pay for a product we have not consumed,” Karen Yokum, of Monongah, wrote in a complaint filed with the West Virginia Public Service Commission on May 13. “The company was just granted a rather large rate increase to assist with increased operating costs. Adding this WNA is really nothing more than an additional rate increase.”
Another customer based in Fairmont accused the Public Service Commission of allowing Hope Gas an additional rate increase through the back door. One customer in Buckhannon argued she should only be charged what she has used.
John Taylor, managing partner of Atrium Economics, testified on behalf of Hope Gas on April 30, 2025. Taylor provided an explanation about why the company sought the ability to charge based on a weather normalization scheme.
“Since the bills of gas customers are largely based on the level of gas usage, temperature-sensitive customers’ monthly bills can vary widely due to changing weather conditions,” Taylor said. “Under traditional ratemaking methods, if actual temperatures were colder than normal, the typical gas customer would use more gas, pay more for service (through volumetric charges), and potentially overpay their share of fixed costs.”
Taylor said unit rates used to recover fixed costs are not reduced to recognize higher gas volumes that are used by customers during colder weather. Since the gas company’s fixed costs do not change with weather, higher gas usage applied against the same unit rate would generate more money. In warmer weather, the opposite happens.
“Customer gas usage decreases with warmer temperatures, thus generating comparatively lower distribution revenues than required to recover the gas utility’s total fixed costs that do not decrease due to warm weather,” Taylor said. “This places the customer at risk for overpaying the utility’s cost of service during colder than normal periods and the utility at risk for not recovering its full cost of service during warmer than normal periods.”
The WNA practice is common across the gas utility industry. However, it came under scrutiny in Philadelphia in May 2022, when some Philadelphia Gas Works customers received abnormally high gas bills after several days of unseasonably warm weather. PGW ended up refunding customers more than $12 million and, in 2023, Pennsylvania’s utility regulators ordered PGW to stop adjusting customers’ bills to account for May weather fluctuations.
The weather normalization adjustment fee was part of a larger 40% revenue request filed with the W.Va. PSC in April 2025. The gas utility requested an additional $79.6 million in annual revenue, according to a commission order filed in February. Morgan K. Brian, president and CEO of Hope Gas, testified the company had expenses to meet from splitting away from Dominion Energy and setting up its corporate headquarters in Morgantown.
DeWitt said she can weather the adjustment fee. But she worries about her neighbors who are not as financially stable.
“Maybe I’m biased, because I think it’s always going to hurt the low man,” she said. “The lowest person on the totem pole. That’s just how I feel. Corporate, they’re all these millionaires, they want the person to take the hit, the customer.”
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