Like other necessities, the cost of heating homes is going up this winter.
Fuel-oil trucks dominate the heating industry in Vermont. The greatest number of homes, 41.4%, heat with oil. In Bennington and Rutland counties, that number rises to 62.3%.
The price of heating oil in New York Harbor, the benchmark wholesale price for oil delivered to New England, was $2.25 a gallon Tuesday.
That’s close to what Scott Sullivan is paying at the Rutland rail terminal, where oil comes from Canada, and at wholesalers in Albany, New York.
Sullivan is the managing partner of Rutland Fuel. His company’s four trucks deliver oil to about 1,500 customers.
He said he is paying about 50 percent more for fuel oil than he did last year.
“Sometime in September, it really started to accelerate into October, and it went up almost like a straight line in October,” Sullivan told VTDigger. “We’re up about a dollar (a gallon) from where we were a year ago.”
He said that’s both wholesale and retail.
Sullivan said he charged customers $2.20 a gallon last year and is charging $3.20 this year.
He is charging less than the average retail price for home heating oil in Vermont, which is $3.27 a gallon.
The standard home tank, Sullivan said, is 275 gallons, so in a year, the cost of filling a tank has gone up by about $275.
Chittenden County is the one county where the majority of homes do not depend on fuel oil. That’s because 57.6 percent of homes are heated by natural gas.
Natural gas is the second-biggest source of heat in Vermont; 18.6 percent of Vermont homes heat with it, all of it coming from Vermont Gas.
Only three of Vermont’s 14 counties have access to natural gas.
Vermont’s gas comes through the Trans-Canada pipeline and across the border at Highgate. From there, it is distributed to 53,000 residential and business customers in Franklin, Chittenden and Addison counties.
Because only Vermont Gas imports natural gas into Vermont, price information is considered proprietary and the government’s official source for energy price research, the Energy Information Agency, withholds current wholesale prices coming over the border at Highgate.
The price of natural gas to homes in Vermont in August, the last month for which the agency has numbers, was 2 percent higher than the previous August.
Vermont Gas did not respond to an emailed request for an interview.
Almost as many homes, 18.4 percent, are heated by bottled gas as by Vermont Gas. In Lamoille County, that number rises to 26.6 percent of homes.
On average, propane costs $3.55 a gallon in Vermont, 30 percent more than last Thanksgiving.
