Opinion: Time to reevaluate massive gas utility infrastructure spending

The big spike in gas utility bills that Maryland residential customers should expect this winter is just the tip of the iceberg. Without major policy changes, customers will see huge increases in their gas bills in the years and decades to come. These looming increases are not because of the cost of gas itself, the source of this winter’s bill hikes, but because of the gas utilities’ massive spending on their local distribution systems — the pipes, concrete, computers, and other infrastructure that utilities use to deliver gas. A report my office is releasing this week shows that the utilities are on track to spend tens of billions of dollars replacing their entire local distribution systems and expanding pipeline capacity, with the state’s largest gas utility this year spending at a rate of more than $1.2 million per day.