What, you don't have that? My electric bill has a rate, a rate for the network, a subscription fee, electricity green taxes, and sales tax. I'm European.

Land of the fee and the home of the slave.

Yeah probably. I’m in the US. Here’s how my bill is broken down and how much it costs for 1000kWh:

Generation Service Charge: $117
Customer Charge: $10 flat fee
Distribution Charge: $94
Transition Charge: -$1
Transmission Charge: $45
Net Meter Recovery Surcharge: $16
Revenue Decoupling Charge: -$1
Distributed Solar Charge: $4
Renewable Energy Charge: $0.50
Energy Efficiency Charge: $31
Electric Vehicle Program: $1

Your country had better have a state owned grid, with a state run retailer, else this is still the same sort of shit, just without hidden fees.

Sincerely, an annoyed Victorian/Australian that wishes their electricity was just managed by the state.

There may be no hidden fees where I'm from, but when there's a private company with a monopoly, what's the difference?

Capitalism/privatisation is such a scam

:(

You're allowed to buy electricity from a separate broker than your "power company" so they split the bill between power usage and service fees plus there's state and local taxes.

My bill in Illinois isn't like this. There's a couple fees to stay hooked into the grid and then a flat rate per unit energy

Variable rate would be nicer but I'm too busy to set it up

In the UK it's all rolled up into the "service charge". Including the "loads of other companies couldn't manage themselves properly and went bust and we had to take on their customers fee"

Not sure your location, but in the us at least most banks have a bill pay service where they will send a paper check for you at no cost.

If fees are independent or partially independent of consumption, i would consider jumping to all electric.

I have converted to a heat pump and induction stove. I legally need auxiliary power to heat my home, so I have to pay 30 dollars a month just for the gas hookup.

That's all they want you to look at anyway

I would be the shithead that would rotate from room to room daily just to fuck their billing up.

company I worked for had a customer that did this with virtual machines. every single week they would request their VMs from last week to be decommissioned and new ones to be built in their place. not bad if there's only five or six. they had this done to over 300 VMs. we accepted for two years, the length of the contract and then promptly dropped them, hard.

the collective backlash caused the company to go bankrupt. they attempted to sue but our lawyers had already created enough documentation to prove we had successfully executed the contract the best of our abilities and had decided to not renew based on high operational costs attributed to the high maintenance requirement of their account and recommended they seek help from a larger competitive service.

the chaos they put operations through was horrible but was only part of the hell they unleashed. we had to dedicate a billing representative to their account because they contested every-single-fucking-bill. these calls would drag on for weeks before ending with them agreeing to pay what we were charging them, just before starting up for the next billing cycle.

point is, just because you're locked in contract doesn't mean they're in control.