Reduce your electricity bill -- in three easy steps!

Follow this easy guide!

1. Find someone, preferably local, who fixed their electricity rate a while ago and who still has plenty of time left on their fixed-price contract.
   
   
2. Run an extension lead to their house, pop an electricity meter on the lead and connect that to your house's main circuit. (You may prefer to ask an electrician to do this.)
   
   
3. Tell your current supplier that you'll be getting your electricity elsewhere and ask them to disconnect you from the grid. (Otherwise you'll be paying the daily standing charge.)

Congratulations -- you just cut your electricity bill!

Now pay for the electricity that you use, direct to your neighbour, at the fixed-rate on their account. Also, pay half of their daily standing charge -- it's only fair.

The fact that this would theoretically work tells you all you need to know about how ridiculous the electricity supply game is in Britain.

The same electricity, travelling down the same cable from the same sub-station, fed from the same power line -- and yet charged at a dramatically different rate purely based on the random chance of whether and when the customer took out a fixed-price contract.

Alternatively...

If you don't like this approach, your best bet is to wait until the system is changed to one in which the country's electricity requirements are estimated, the electricity is bought and/or generated at a sensible price, the unit cost is calculated by dividing one by the other, and everyone is charged at that rate.

You'll probably be waiting a long time for that.

Because, while economy of scale is absolutely taken for granted in the corporate world, if you try doing that as a community of people, you'll be laughed out of town as a communist.