With so much public attention on the ever-higher taxes that state and municipal governments impose on us all, it can be easy to overlook yet another unavoidable cost that is becoming increasingly unbearable in the Chicago area. We’re referring to the price of keeping the lights on and staying warm in winter. We’ve written more than once about the absurdly high heating bills in Chicago tied to Peoples Gas’ decades-long multi-billion-dollar project to rework the gas-pipe system under the city’s streets. But households and businesses outside Chicago are getting similar treatment from Nicor Gas, the utility serving most of the suburbs. Nicor on Tuesday filed for a $309 million increase in the rates it charges to deliver natural gas to its 2.3 million customers. If approved by the Illinois Commerce Commission, which has 11 months to decide, the hike will be the largest increase in state history by a gas utility. The average monthly residential gas bill would increase by $7.50, or $90 per year. Nicor said the residential bill for the average customer last year was $901, so this increase alone would raise the price of keeping warm by 10%. We see homeowners get angry when their property taxes go up by that much. This is just a single utility bill. Making matters worse, this rate-hike request is only the latest in a barrage of increases over the past several years. From 2018 to 2024, Nicor won repeated rate hikes from state regulators that increased delivery charges by a total of 101%, or an average of 16.8% annually, according to Illinois PIRG, a consumer advocacy group. Needless to say, that’s not simply keeping up with inflation. Nicor’s rate hikes aren’t sustainable and by themselves are exacerbating the cost-of-living issues keeping the Chicago-area economy stuck in neutral. Here’s an even scarier thought: That $901 average annual residential gas bill last year was lower than it had been in recent years because the price of natural gas itself — Nicor, like all utilities, passes its fuel costs along to customers at no markup — was the lowest it had been since 2020, when the pandemic reduced prices for commodities of all kinds. If natural gas prices had equaled what they did in 2023, the average residential customer would have paid about another $125 over the year. We’ve seen gas costs far higher than 2023 before as well. As is the case with Peoples, Nicor’s exorbitant price spikes are due to historically high capital spending on projects updating the pipes and other infrastructure that distribute the fuel keeping the chill away. The way that utility regulation works, companies recover their spending from ratepayers and earn a substantial profit on that investment through their rates. The more the companies spend, the more they make. The only barrier to that foolproof profit machine are the regulators who must determine that the utilities’ projects are needed. Illinois’ utility regulators at the Commerce Commission are engaged as we write on a “Future of Gas” analysis that contemplates eventually phasing out carbon-emitting natural gas for alternative sources of heat, like electricity. That report, originally set to be delivered in the summer, has been delayed until February 2026. In the meantime, Nicor and Peoples keep investing like gas will heat Chicago-area homes for the next century. Nicor is owned by Southern Co., an Atlanta-based corporation that owns utilities all over the Southeast. Northern Illinois is a remote outpost for Southern. Its corporate decision-makers don’t live here and we suspect they don’t spend much time fretting about the political fallout from ever-increasing rates. So, as we’ve said in regard to Peoples’ outrageous rate-hike proposals for Chicagoans, it’s up to the five members of the Commerce Commission, all of whom were appointed by Gov. JB Pritzker, to send the message to Atlanta that delivery rate hikes at more than five times the rate of inflation for years on end aren’t acceptable anymore. Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].