Friday evening on the outskirts of North Albany: The end of another mild day.
In case you had not noticed, the bills Albany area residents received in March for power and natural gas reflected quite a jump in temperatures during the billing period, which covered much of February.
This should have been a welcome development because it tended to keep heating bills down.
Pacific Power said the average daily temperature for the March billing of an Albany address was 43 degrees. Though not exactly toasty, this was 3 degrees higher than during the comparable period the year before.
On the bill I’m looking at, this translated to an average daily cost of electricity of $1.98, down from $2.10 the year before.
On a bill covering a time span later in the month, Northwest Natural reported an average daily temperature of 44.7 degrees, up from 40.9 degrees last year. The bill showed gas usage of 115 therms, down from 129 therms in 2023.
The utility bills are in line with temperature readings the Oregon Climate Service reports from the Hyslop Farm weather station of Oregon State University.
At Hyslop, situated between Albany and Corvallis, the average daily high temperature in February was 5.8 degrees above the 20-year average for the month. The mean low reading was 3.5 degrees above average.
This story, I’d like to point out, is not about “climate change.” It’s about temperature readings, and about the welcome effect one month’s average temperature rise has had on utility bills around here.
As for a changing climate, the local readings are inconclusive.
For example, while February readings were higher than the mean over the last 20 years, the average maximum and minimum temperatures at Hyslop for March so far are both 0.9 degrees below the 20-year mean. (This seems plausible to me, considering some chilly bike rides I’ve had over the last couple of weeks even though the weather has been mostly mild.)
As everyone knows, temperatures change with the weather. This year, February was warmer than average. But last year, according to the Hyslop readings, February, March and April were all colder than average.
Which is to say, let’s be grateful for the mild temperatures we had last month. (hh)
I don’t care how you tell it the power company is way out of sight.
What?