Your gas bill is going up in August. Your power bill, mercifully, is not.

Medicine Hat's monthly ritual of publishing its energy rates rarely makes for thrilling reading, but this month's numbers are worth a glance before the next bill lands — natural gas customers are paying more, while electricity customers get to sit this one out.

The city has set its August natural gas default rate at $1.537 per gigajoule, up from $1.362 in July, according to the City of Medicine Hat's official rate notice. That's roughly a 13 per cent jump month over month. The city says the figure is based on the weighted average cost of its natural gas purchases for the month, with an extra seven cents per gigajoule tacked on to cover transaction costs and a small rate of return, all spelled out in the Gas Utility Bylaw.

Electricity is a calmer story. For residential, farm, small and medium commercial, unmetered services and rental lighting customers, the default rate holds at seven cents per kilowatt-hour — the same rate it's been at for months. That's not because wholesale prices have been especially cooperative; the city's calculated market rate for July through September actually works out to just 4.47 cents per kilowatt-hour, well below the seven-cent floor. Under the Electric Utility Bylaw, the default rate simply can't drop below that minimum, no matter how low wholesale prices go, nor rise above an 11-cent ceiling.

Large commercial, industrial and street lighting customers are in a different bucket entirely, paying a default rate of 12.025 cents per kilowatt-hour — a figure pegged to the average of Rate of Last Resort prices set by Direct Energy, ENMAX and EPCOR under Alberta Utilities Commission rules. That rate is expected to hold steady through the end of the year.

There's also the Going Green surcharge, the line item that funds the city's renewable energy purchases, which residential, farm, and small and medium commercial customers will see set at 0.43 cents per kilowatt-hour for August.

None of this is thrilling stuff, admittedly, but for a city that runs its own utility, it's the kind of quiet transparency that's worth an occasional read — particularly the month your gas bill jumps 13 per cent and you want to know why.