The Herald-Scum tells us,

HUNDREDS of thousands of Victorian householders will pay up to $150 more for energy bills next year in the latest wave of price rises.

If the price of something goes up, use less of it, and you'll pay the same or less.

The biggest electricity price rise is for Origin, 9%. The current rate is 15.5c/kWh for conventional power. So the largest increase is 1.4c/kWh.

Households vary a lot in how much they use, as noted in this page about WA. 7,600kWh annually is a fair middle figure for most of Australia.

At 1.4c/kWh increase, this would be $103 extra. However, $103 with electricity at 16.9c/kWh buys 609kWh. This is 8% of that 7,600kWh consumption, so by reducing by 8% or from 20kWh/day to 19kWh/day, households could avoid the higher cost.

1kWh is pretty easy to knock off the average consumption. It's 20 minutes of airconditioning. It's about how much is used by all those standby lights and clocks on every appliance in the house. Turn off all appliances at the wall when not in use, there you go, you just made your bill stay the same.

The Herald-Scum tends to assume its readers are clueless morons. If the price goes up, use less. Of course there comes a point when you're at some minimum level of consumption - you have to keep the fridge going, and cook, and have at least one light on at night. But most of us are far from that now. 20kWh/day, we can use less than that. We use under 6kWh/day in our household, the price could triple and we'd still be paying less than we did five years ago when we used 20kWh/day.