WESTFIELD — Westfield Gas & Electric (WG&E) customers should expect to see fluctuating heating bills as the winter continues to display both record cold and record warm temperatures.

WG&E General Manager Thomas Flaherty said that after December 2022 was 15 to 20 percent colder than the previous December, leading to higher heating bills, January ended up being the warmest January in 40 years, which led to much lower heating bills.

“We should have saved about 20 percent in energy usage,” said Flaherty.

For February bills, which are sent out in March, ratepayers may see a swing in the other direction, thanks in part to the cold snap that hit the region during the first weekend of the month, and resulted in temperatures far below zero degrees.

Flaherty said the swings in temperatures have been an exercise in load management for the municipal utility company. For just Feb. 3, the first day of the cold snap, Flaherty said WG&E had to purchase an additional 8,000 dekatherms of natural gas — nearly doubling the typical February day’s consumption of 10,000 dekatherms. This cost WG&E $640,000. The following day, the utility bought an extra 4,000 dekatherms, which cost $600,000 as prices fluctuated wildly.

“The upside, thank God, is that we at least had planned for that in our budget,” said Flaherty. “We instilled a conservative management approach to this winter, especially with the extreme volatility of the last year.”

Flaherty said the rest of February is expected to remain relatively warm, with temperatures above average. Once it is clear how the rest of the month will go, Flaherty said he hopes to be able to see a rate reduction for natural gas in April and May as the winter season ends.

“Then we are waiting to see where the summer shapes up for electricity,” said Flaherty.

Earlier this month, the state Department of Public Utilities (DPU) announced that investor-owned utilities operating in Massachusetts would have their energy rates reduced, which Flaherty said has no impact on the municipally run WG&E.

“We report to DPU in a few manners, like natural gas and pipeline safety. But as far as setting rates, they cannot tell us we have to do it,” said Flaherty.

Looking back to the coldest days of December, when a cold snap fell on most of the country, Flaherty said the strain on the energy distribution network was close to becoming much more serious.

“Many places came really close to rolling blackouts in December, right around Christmas,” said Flaherty. “We were at a breaking point for the grid.”

He thanked the workers who responded to fix broken infrastructure during both of this season’s cold snaps.

“Kudos to our guys being in frigid temps up in a bucket through the weekend. They responded to fix 10 outages over the weekend,” Flaherty said on Feb. 9.