Being stuck at the end of the pipeline has always put us at a disadvantage. But we’re about to feel the pain in a way that we’ve never quite felt before.

National Grid plans to raise its electricity rates for the November-April season by 37 percent from a year ago. That’s an extra $33 on the typical household’s bill of $88. And we thought the 20-percent increase we saw from Grid at this time last fall was bad. NStar doesn’t file for another month or so because its next pricing season starts in January, but its customers will likely see their bills go through the roof as well. Hate on the utilities all you want. But these increases are essentially out of their control. They’re just the middlemen, passing the escalating commodity costs on to the rest of us. In Grid’s case, its cost for electric supplies is going up by more than 60 percent.

To some extent, the natural gas market across the country is at the mercy of the infamous “polar vortex” that plunged everywhere north of Orlando into a deep freeze last winter. Demand was exceptionally high for natural gas as a heating fuel as a result, driving up its costs for the power plants that use gas to generate electricity.

The unusually cold weather just exacerbated the flaws that already exist in New England’s energy infrastructure — flaws that keep our electricity prices here roughly 40 percent higher than the national average. One of those flaws is our overwhelming reliance on natural gas to generate electricity: On a normal day, more than half of our power comes from natural gas. You’d think that would be great for our economy, with all the cheap gas just waiting to be unleashed a few hundred miles to the west in the Marcellus Shale. Not exactly.

On cold days, the gas that gets shipped here from Marcellus gets sent to the people and businesses who need it to heat their homes. The natural gas utilities' contracts for heating customers typically give them priority over the natural gas-fired power plants. On those cold days last winter, less than a quarter of New England’s power came from natural gas. Grid operator ISO New England says the region’s five major gas pipelines were often at or near capacity. Most of the gas-fired power plants simply didn’t run at all, and the ones that did paid a premium for their gas. So the old coal and oil-fired turbines get cranked up, including ones that are only still left standing for these times of extreme need. Oil is typically more expensive than natural gas. But not last winter in New England.

It gets worse. The Salem coal plant closed for good a few months ago, and the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant will shut down by the end of the year. The wholesale market for electricity is factoring in those departures from the grid, so they’re playing a key role in how power gets priced this winter.

New England’s governors are well aware that there’s not enough of that cheap Marcellus gas when we need it. That’s why they had proposed an unprecedented solution: a tax on the electric market that would subsidize the cost of building new pipeline capacity for the region. The expense would more than pay for itself over time, the theory went, by bringing in more cheap shale gas to the region. Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration recently put those talks on hold, after a related piece of legislation that would bring more hydropower in from Canada died at the State House. But the governors haven’t dropped the idea.

Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association, tells me he doesn’t believe that kind of government intervention is the right answer. He points to the new wave of developers that are lining up with proposed power plants, pipelines and power lines to capitalize on the region’s demands for gas and electricity. None of these kinds of projects get built overnight. Most would take years to build. But electricity prices around here are getting so high, these big investments are becoming more worthwhile than they’ve been in a long time. “The prices we’re seeing now are the necessary market signal to drive the market transition,” Dolan says.

Bob Rio of Associated Industries of Massachusetts tells me state leaders have focused for too long on spurring construction of windmills and solar panels that they lost sight of an increasing threat to the state’s economy.

“This is what happens when you ignore your infrastructure, and your roof falls down,” Rio says. “You can paint the walls and have granite countertops. But if your roof is no good, it doesn’t matter.”

Rio, of course, is referring to our inadequate infrastructure to draw enough natural gas from the west or enough Canadian hydropower from the north when we need them the most. This is playing out in terms of high electricity prices this winter, and it could pose a threat to electricity reliability down the road if we can’t figure out a way to get more juice into the heart of New England’s economy.

I’m sure we won’t be the only ones paying the price for last winter’s unusually cold weather. But it gets worse for us when you add our already sky-high power prices, departing power plants and transmission constraints into the equation. Forget about the polar vortex. New Englanders could end up feeling a different kind of chill every time they pay their monthly electric bill.

Courtesy of Daniel Acker, Boston Business Journal