Why are heating oil customers facing another tough winter?

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1. 1

   Multi-Scale Decomposition and Analogue Modeling of Heating Oil Prices

   IGI Global eBooks (Zhang)Published Sep 8, 2025Checked Oct 13, 2026

   “This study investigates the periodic behavior of U.S. residential heating oil prices (1990–2025) using three analytical techniques: wavelet multiresolution decomposition, analogue pattern retrieval, and spectral analysis via FFT. Wavelet analysis disentangles price dynamics into long-term trends, seasonal cycles, and high-frequency noise, identifying a dominant annual seasonality alongside irregular multi-year cycles. Analogue retrieval finds historical winters (2003–04, 2017–18, 2013–14) with similar price patterns to the 2024–25 winter, aiding scenario-based forecasting. Spectral analysis confirms the strength of the 1-year cycle and highlights significant low-frequency variability. The integrated approach provides a comprehensive understanding of price formation driven by seasonal demand, macro trends, and episodic shocks. Findings support hybrid forecasting strategies combining trend modeling, seasonal adjustment, and analogue-based scenario analysis, with implications for energy planning, policy interventions, and market hedging.”

2. 2

   Stress-testing the EU energy system: Modeling resilience without Russian gas.

   iScience (Chyong & Schmidt)Published Jun 1, 2026Checked Oct 13, 2026

   “Europe's gas and electricity markets are deeply intertwined, making the system vulnerable to compound supply and demand shocks-particularly following the loss of Russian pipeline gas. Using a global coupled gas-electricity partial-equilibrium model that incorporates LNG trade, storage behavior, demand-side response, and multiple weather scenarios, we show that Europe can generally maintain physical supply even under severe stress. The principal vulnerability lies not in outright shortages but in sharp, asymmetric price spikes, especially during cold winters or when LNG supply is constrained. LNG import capacity, gas storage, hydropower, and fuel switching in the power sector act as key stabilizers, though network bottlenecks persist in Eastern and Southern Europe. Accelerated renewables deployment materially reduces exposure to gas-linked price volatility, whereas additional Russian LNG has only a marginal impact on prices. These findings point to the importance of system-wide stress testing, targeted infrastructure investment, and reducing gas's role as the marginal price setter in electricity markets.”

3. 3

   The Mortality Effects of Winter Heating Prices

   The Economic Journal (Chirakijja et al.)Published Sep 5, 2023Checked Oct 13, 2026

   “This paper examines how the price of home heating affects mortality in the United States. Exposure to cold is one reason that mortality peaks in winter, and a higher heating price increases exposure to cold by reducing heating use. Our empirical approach combines spatial variation in the energy source used for home heating and temporal variation in the national prices of natural gas and electricity. We find that a lower heating price reduces winter mortality, driven mostly by cardiovascular and respiratory causes. Our estimates imply that the 42% drop in the natural gas price in the late 2000s, mostly driven by the shale gas boom, averted 12,500 deaths per year in the United States. The effect appears to be especially large in high-poverty communities.”

4. 4

   The Price Elasticity of Heating and Cooling Energy Demand

   Research paper (Gechert et al.)Published Jul 14, 2025Checked Oct 13, 2026

   “We create a large meta-dataset of price elasticities of energy demand for heating and cooling in buildings, comprising close to 5000 price elasticity estimates including study and observation characteristics from more than 400 primary studies. We find robust and strong signs of p-hacking and publication bias with insignificant or positive elasticities being underrepresented. Correcting for this bias, the price elasticities range from -0.05 to -0.2 for the short run and from -0.1 to -0.3 for the long run. This holds for all relevant fossil fuels and electricity, poor and rich countries, residential and business usage, and aggregate and survey data.”

5. 5

   Fuel Tax Incidence and Supply Conditions

   National Bureau of Economic Research (Marion & Muehlegger)Published Mar 1, 2011Checked Oct 13, 2026

   “The incidence of taxes on consumers and producers plays a central role in evaluating energy tax policy, yet the literature testing the main predictions of the tax incidence model is sparse.In this paper, we examine the pass-through rate of state gasoline and diesel taxes to retail prices, and importantly we estimate the dependence of pass-through on factors constraining the gasoline and diesel supply chains.We consider several factors that alter the elasticity of supply, including within state heterogeneity in gasoline content requirements, refinery capacity utilization, inventory constraints, and variation in the demand for untaxed uses of diesel.In general, we find that in periods of time when the supply chain is constrained, and the constraint is plausibly unrelated to shifts in demand, the pass-through rate of fuel taxes declines.We describe several potential implications for tax policy, including tax breaks during peak driving season and during times of supply disruptions such as after major hurricanes.”

6. 6

   Heating oil customers face tough winter despite shake-up promise

   BBC NewsPublished Oct 12, 2026Checked Oct 13, 2026

   “Heating oil customers facing soaring bills are promised better regulation of the sector by the government.”