Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). We will take our first question from the line of Ryan Rosenthal with Sidoti & Company. Your line is open.
Ryan Rosenthal - Sidoti & Company
Good morning, everyone.
Vince Ammann
Good morning, Ryan.
James DeGraffenreidt
Good morning.
Ryan Rosenthal - Sidoti & Company
A couple of questions for you. First of all, congrats on the solid quarter and the increased guidance. Concerning the retail energy marketing division, can you discuss the increase in expected volume as well as the margin that you are looking for now and what caused those increases?
Vince Ammann
Ryan, you are breaking up a little bit. I think you asked us to address the increase in volumes and increase in margins and I think Harry is prepared to do that.
Harry Warren
Right. Yes, this is Harry. Yes, let me break down, you know James mentioned in his comments that the change in $0.08 broke down through a few different categories. One was higher sales volumes for electricity and gas, another category was higher margin recognition that we are expecting this coming summer due to the forward prices, and then the third component was the offset of higher bad debt.
I think if we look across for gas and electricity, the higher volumes which in electricity are coming really from the higher sales volumes, as we are increasing our large commercial customer base at this time.
On the gas side, we are seeing a combination of a little bit of increased customer base and also some colder weather over the first four months of the year. The combination of those factors is about $0.04 a share positive, pretty equally split between gas and electricity.
Then we have the offset of the higher bad debt expenses, which is in one of the slides in the presentation. That is about $0.03 offset there. Then that leaves us with about $0.07 of improvement from higher unit margin that we are expecting over the course of the year.
A fair bit of that is coming from the fact that with very low projected summer gas prices right now and with the fact that the forward curve is in a steep upward slope or a contango in trigger language, both of those things have the effect of increasing our reported margins over the course of the summer. So, that is how that is breaking down between margins and volumes.
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