BGE officials await questioning by regulators about excessively high bills.

Unusually cold weather was offered by Baltimore Gas and Electric officials yesterday as the primary reason for the jaw-dropping increase in customers’ January bills.

But the blame-Mother-Nature argument did not seem to go over too well with some members of the Maryland Public Service Commission, who had summoned utility officials to Baltimore to explain the phenomenon.

“It’s not freakishly cold,” said Douglas R.M. Nazarian, commission chairman, at the hearing before a packed crowd of media and ratepayers.

((Bonus reading for bummed-out ratepayers: Unbelievable puff piece on Mayo A. Shattuck III, the CEO of BGE’s parent Constellation Energy Group Inc., from The Washington Post in 2006.))

The company’s other explanations for the whopping bills, that have prompted a flood of complaints? Higher commodity prices, unusually long billing cycles, the inefficiencies of heat pumps in cold weather or customers’ use of energy-sucking devices such as flat screen TVs or game consoles. They did not attempt to document sudden spiking in X-Box and Playstation gaming.

The weather defense
BGE, Maryland’s largest energy provider, made their case yesterday (The Baltimore Sun has the power point up) with a raft of temperature data, including charts showing January 2009 was 15 percent colder than nornal and 22 percent colder than the previous January.

Going a bit further, in his remarks before the commission, BGE vice president Wayne Harbaugh noted that NASA “just put out a report within the last two days that said 2008 was the coldest year in ten years.” (Never mind that the study refers to the entire planet and the entire year, it sounded pretty good.)

Was it the weather? Commenters on Frank Roylance’s Sun weather blog in the Sun have been crunching the numbers and speculating about this question in recent weeks.

BGE had a number of other explanations yesterday that brought sharp questions from commissioners, among them icy weather preventing meter readers from doing their jobs and the longer school break this year, thanks to when religious holidays fell on the calendar. You can read coverage of the hearing in the Sun and the Post, which is also reporting today that termination notices have skyrocketed. From October 2006 to September 2008, shut-offs jumped 23 percent across the state, and arrearages were up 44 percent, the paper reported.

Consumer advocates said they hoped the hearing would light a fire under regulators to push utilities to reinstitute programs to promote energy efficiency, which they said were abandoned by the companies after deregulation.

“Compared to other states, Maryland does little to nothing to help people use energy more wisely,” said Johanna Neumann, state director of the Public Interest Research group known as PIRG.