A Texas event and banquet venue sent us 14 billing periods of gas bills. Repriced at the rate they hold today, those same metered volumes would have cost about $28,500 less — roughly 37% off the commodity line.
Get A Free QuoteThe customer operates an event and banquet venue in Texas — large halls booked for weddings, conferences, and community events, with a commercial kitchen behind them. Natural gas does the two jobs that matter most to a building like this: it heats a lot of open volume, and it cooks.
Across 14 consecutive billing periods the venue burned 9,270 MCF, averaging roughly 660 MCF a month — call it 7,900 MCF a year. But the average hides the story. Their lightest month came in at 343 MCF. Their heaviest hit 1,254 MCF, about three and a half times as much. The four consecutive winter months at the end of the window accounted for roughly 4,390 MCF — about 47% of the entire 14-period total, burned in under a third of the time.
That shape is exactly why an unshopped commodity rate hurts a venue more than it hurts a steady-load building. Savings scale with volume, so a bad rate does its worst damage in the months the meter spins hardest. A venue that shrugs at its September gas bill can be badly exposed in February without ever changing how it operates.
Meanwhile the rate they were billed was not holding still. Over those 14 periods their commodity rate stepped up three separate times, each increase landing without a negotiation, a comparison, or a phone call. Nobody had ever shopped the molecule.
This customer is anonymized. We do not publish the company, its city, its local distribution company, its supplier, or its account identifiers.
One bill would have missed the point. We asked for all of them.
A single bill from a seasonal building tells you almost nothing — pick September and you understate the exposure by a factor of three. We pulled the full billing history, separated the commodity charges from the LDC's delivery charges, and rebuilt every period line by line at a quotable rate.
We took the venue's real annual volume and its winter-weighted load shape to licensed Texas natural gas suppliers. Offers were compared on total commodity cost across the full term against this venue's actual monthly pattern — not on a headline price quoted against a flat average that nobody actually burns.
The venue signed a 36-month fixed commodity contract, and gas is being delivered under it now. Their local distribution company did not change. Neither did the pipes, the meter, the delivery charges, or who to call about a leak. Only the commodity portion of the bill moved.
The gap between what this venue was billed for gas across 14 periods and what the same 9,270 metered MCF would have cost at the rate it now holds — about 37% off the commodity line.
This is a look-back, not a forecast. Those 14 periods were billed at the venue's old rate and that money is spent — the comparison reprices real, metered volumes at the contract rate now in force to show how wide the gap had gotten. It is not a projection of what the next three years will save, because that depends on volumes and weather nobody has seen yet.
The gap tracked the season. In the venue's heaviest month — about 1,254 MCF — the difference between the two rates came to roughly $4,470 in that single billing period. In its lightest month it was under a quarter of that. Same rate, same building, same contract: the exposure simply followed the load.
We publish the savings, the usage behind them, and the percentage — but not the per-MCF rate on either side, and not the contract dates. Every account prices differently on volume, load shape, LDC territory, and the day it signs, so a rate quoted here would tell you nothing reliable about yours. What this case shows is the size of a gap that can sit unnoticed in a gas contract that nobody thought to shop.
Send us a year of gas bills and we'll build this same period-by-period comparison around your actual volumes — no obligation, no pressure, no fee to you.
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