The key part of Glen’s question is of course “What are you going to do about it?”. Often the answer is just moan about it for a while but not do anything. Alternative methods of generation have already been discussed but they’re not necessarily practical or affordable for everybody. For instance, if you live in a block of flats you may not have a roof to fit your own solar panels on, and so on.
But, in most cases, it should be possible to do a power budget.
In other words, re-assess your power use and see where the money really goes and what you can change. Check how much each appliance uses. For instance, LED lghting is becoming more widely available and the prices are dropping. It’s cheap to run, but on its own it won’t make a major difference to the bill. Tumble dryers, irons, toasters, certain type of aircons, stoves, electric heaters, etc can all suck it up. But unless you check their individual ratings (or better still, monitor them separately) you won’t know which ones that are worth cutting down on or replacing.
Some wired-in items like stoves or aircons require you to monitor your meter, but you can buy a gizmo that will tell you what plug-in items are using. Like this one:
https://www.jaycar.com.au/mains-power-meter/p/MS6115
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, young or old, that our bills will continue to rise. If you have a stab at doing a power budget, and assess the real cost of using all your appliances, you’ll then have some data to inform decisions on what to keep, what to cut back on and what to ditch altogether. We have ditched an electric heater, and cut down on our use of a number of items (e.g. tumble dryer). I have also nobly decided never to use even a single watt on ironing any of my clothes….
Small savings do add up over time. Using Allan's example of the kettle that uses 2,400 watts, it's clear that it wastes power and money to keep filling the kettle right up. Only boiling the amount that you're about to use and not heating water that will simply stay in the kettle and then cool back down again makes sense and does save money. And so on.
But when we looked at all the alternatives (e.g. using hand tools instead of power tools, candles instead of electric light, hand washing clothes, cutting down on toast and hot drinks, etc) accepting the cost of buying a certain amount of power has always seemed worth the cost to us. once we knew more accurately what that cost was.
So far anyway!
Cheers,
Chris