Just got charged for reading it

It drives me nuts that my state has "deregulated" natural gas. All natural gas in the region is supplied to every home by a single company (the same one as before deregulation). I pay at least $35 a month all year just for the privilege of being connected to it.
BUT, I don't actually do business with that company. I get to pick from a dozen companies that all provide front-end billing for my natural gas. They advertise how much they will charge per therm used (plus an admin fee), but that price is on top of what I pay to the company actually providing gas. If I have an issue with the gas, the supplier comes out to deal with it, not the company I pay every month. And, I have to change companies every 6-24 months to maintain the advertised rates, otherwise they increase my cost after the new customer price expires. Its fake competition that added an extra step to the process and increases prices compared to the regulated version that used to exist.

The worst for me is my gas bill. My bill is usually around $50-$60 per month, and when you break it down, the actual gas I use is $3. The rest are fees.
- If fees are independent or partially independent of consumption, i would consider jumping to all electric.
  
  I'm in Texas, and our electric provider added a $200/month fee for all accounts for the next 2 decades to pay for the 2021 winter storm. They bought electricity from other providers during the storm for like 1000x the standard rate and passed the cost towards future customers.
  And the beauty of that is that those fees also impact solar users who aren't even using power, since a certificate of occupancy requires that a house be connected to the grid.
  
  And then when more than a third of people do that, suddenly the state mandates paying for a connection anyways. (Of course the mandate is completely unrelated to the nice dinners that senators enjoy.)
  
  That’s the plan for the future. It’s easy to switch to induction for cooking. The bigger and more expensive switch are the A/C and water heater, which I need to assess (and budget) for.
- 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.

My condo building just got rid of the company that meters our water. After years of this we could finally break the contract.
My water bill usage was something like $15/mo and they had an admin fee of $13/mo. In a building of like 150 apartments, those guys were raking in like $2k a month from us for keeping their automated shit plugged in.
The managers said they would just stop metering and our monthly fees would pay the bill. After a year, they would adjust our monthly rates to balance it out.
They never had to balance it out - that’s how little the overall water usage cost was.

The fees are bad... but the amount of bullshit they can make you jump through to hook solar up to your place is bullshit of an entirely different fragrance. They can take up to a month to approve or deny the plan, suggest revisions, and then take another month, up to 90 days worth. Then they have ANOTHER 90 days after the fact to "inspect and approve" or "suggest revisions" to the installation. It's a god damned Columbian goat screw

another dollar wont hurt fee ahould be 1.75 cos of taxes

This is why you should never privatize natural monopolies.

~~$389.69~~ (My math was off…. Sorry) $390.68
I had to sorry.
- That's all they want you to look at anyway

No billing fee?

Is this some USA joke I'm too European to understand?
- 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
  
  720kWh, Germany:
  Consumption charge: 183€
  Base fee: 182€
  Electricity tax: 15€
  Revenue tax: 72€
  Total 450€
- 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
  :(
- 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"
  
  Same in Germany, it's called "base fee"
- 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.
  
  Nothing beats Portugal:
  Kwh rate
  Social electricity finance tax
  General economic costs fee
  Infrastructure utilization fee
  Energy and geology exploration tax
  Electricity consumption Special tax
  Audiovisual contribution
  Sales tax
  
  The entire breakdown of my electricity bill in the UK is a rate for energy use, a standing charge that is independent of usage, and VAT. Strictly speaking I've got two different usage rates because my heating is on a separate meter, but that's an unusual situation
  
  Australia checking in. We have the price per Kw, and the number of Kw consumed.
  
  Here it boils down to:
  Network power (fixed fee based on your max power needs, depends on time as well, can be 3.6€ / kw in winter months)
  Network energy transfer (fee for energy transfered, here its about 0.018€/kwh)
  Energy (fee on the energy used, about 0.146€/kwh right now)
  VAT
  some bullshit for maintenance and running an open market portal for companies to buy/sell energy (like 1-3€)
  
  Usually taxes and transmission fees are rolled into the kWh Price you are shown when enrolling into the contract
- Land of the fee and the home of the slave.
- 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.
  
  Being allowed to on paper and actually being able to are wildly different things. They're monopolies in most areas that get away with it by stringently denying that fact. Same with cable companies.
  
  You're allowed to buy electricity from a separate broker than your "power company"
  I'm curious about this, would you be willing to elaborate?
  Where I live we don't have a choice of electricity providers for my home. Are you talking about states that have deregulated energy markets?

Convenience fee, when there is only one option to pay and the only one who finds it convenient is the service provider.

I’ve tried setting up bank draft for my electric like 6 times, to avoid the 3% “convenience fee” for using a credit card. For some reason, it will not work. They have the option, I set it up, it says I need to wait several days to use it, and then it just vanishes from my account.
Calling the company gets me a rude person who barely speaks English. Government subsidized monopolies. Internet is even worse.
- 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.
  
  Not sure your location
  I bet it's Texas.

Don't forget to tip your landlord

$50 fee for other people using solar panels

I always thought BT should get into the property market. They could sell a house, then rent that house to its new owner, then charge them a fee for using each room.
- 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.
  
  So I'm trying to wrap my head around why they would do this and how that even worked. They would decommission them on Friday and have them rebuilt on Monday? These didn't have a specific config then I assume? And they did it because they paid per hour the machine existed so it made sense cost wise?
  
  If your company was hosting virtual machines and people staring and stopping them caused you headaches, it just seems to me like the company you worked at was absolute trash lol.