Efficient, well-managed Transportation and Storage are extremely important to our members. Thanks to the growth of our Member Network, we have many different load patterns, transportation agreements, swing capabilities, and storage arrangements that we can mix and match every day to optimize transport and storage to avoid penalties.
It is safe to say that our penalties are far below $.01 per Mcf over the past 15 years. We know we could eliminate all penalties by convincing our members to buy too much storage and overbuy our supply, but our members feel it is better to incur some small penalties than to over commit to supplies and storage.
The pipelines are a very critical element in our service chain. Our relationship with the pipelines has helped us aggregate all of the member transport and storage under one roof. It is much easier to take advantage of weather fronts and offsetting demands when we can aggregate and pool our resources. Again, this is the result of Clayton Energy's Member Network, which provides strength in numbers.
Often, an individual utility is either short or long on transportation or storage. But Clayton's experts work with the pipelines to move excess capacity from one member to another through our single pool. As a result, the utility avoids paying market premiums when they are short, also avoiding discounts for their capacity when they are long. In fact, our members don’t have to worry about their capacity positions, because they are handled automatically within our member network.