[CarlinsDarlin]

I'm a member of an Electric Cooperative. Each month, the cooperative publishes a magazine called "Rural Arkansas." This month's magazine had the following comments as a part of an article entitled, "Rise in fuel prices, looming environmental regulations may lead to higher electric bills for consumers." It's a pretty straight forward explanation of the reasons behind rising electricity costs, but also explains some about resource depletion that I think is a good message to get across. Let's just hope people actually read the article, and extrapolate that knowledge to oil as well as natural gas.

(btw, I would have posted a link, but to my knowledge, the publication is not on line)

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'S')ome consumers across the nation are experiencing higher electricity and heating bills in recent months, and they want to know why. Several factors go into the increased prices, including the rising price of natural gas and coal. Both fuels are used to produce the majority of electricity in this country. The rise in price of these fuels gets passed directly on to the consumer.

According to industry commentators, the rise in the price of natural gas is an issue of supply and demand. On the supply side, there are decreasing amounts of natural gas coming from developed areas. Moreover, gas exploration and development is currently limited, or excluded, in certain areas of the Gulf of Mexico, the Rocky Mountains, the Great Lakes and both the east and west coasts.

Demand for natural gas has increased int he past several years for several reasons. One reason is that natural gas forecasters predicted that natural gas supplies would be plentiful and inexpensive in the early 1990s. This spurred a building boom in gas-fired power plants rather than building more costly coal-fired plants. In addition, natural gas is a cleaner buring fuel than coal. Given looming environmental regulations governing coal plants and the promise of plentiful supply, power companies invested in building natural gas plants. This has increased demand for natural gas. Correspondingly, coal prices have gone up as natural gas prices have gone up.