Based in Portland, Oregon, we serve residential, commercial and industrial customers in Western Oregon and Southwest Washington.

As of August 2020, our customers totaled more than 2.5 million people, with 770,000 meters.

A therm is a unit of energy equal to 100,000 British Thermal Units (BTUs). One BTU is the amount of energy needed to raise or lower the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit.

In Oregon, the typical residential customer uses an average of 53 therms per month.

In Washington, the typical residential customer uses an average of 57 therms per month.

Several factors affect rates:

1) Oregon and Washington regulators require NW Natural to adjust its rates each year based on how much it pays for natural gas during a 12-month period.

2) The Weighted Average Cost of Gas (WACOG) helps determine how much a customer will pay for each therm of gas. These annual Purchased Gas Adjustment (PGA) changes take effect on November 1 of each year.

Note: NW Natural does not profit from the price of natural gas.

We were among the first utilities in the U.S. to “decouple” the cost of maintaining our pipelines from the natural gas within them. This means our rates are structured so that we have no financial incentive to sell more natural gas.

Each state has different regulators and different rate structures, so the percentage change in gas costs filed each November differs.

Because the current rates differ to begin with, the same dollar amount of change will show up as a different percentage.

The percentage of change will be bigger if the current per-therm cost is smaller and NW Natural has different regulatory agreements in the two states, which create small differences in the cost per therm of natural gas.