The answer my friend ...

The boys check the electric meters for defects.

        "Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh," Warren screamed, falling over backwards off his chair, the just-opened mail fluttering slowly down over him.
      Marty, waking from his nap, wondered what the silly half-brother was on about this time. The income tax fiasco had been settled by H&R Brick, so what could have set him off this time.
     "This electric bill is obscene," Warren said as he gathered up all the papers off the floor. "Those dogs at Irrational Greed have gone too far this time. I can't believe they more than doubled the electric bill from last month."
     "You're crazy," Marty said. "That can't be true, let me see the bills." Warren handed over the new bills and Marty grabbed a calculator and began adding up the long numbers on the right side of the decimal point to figure out the electric rate.
     "OK, to start there's 'Electricity Supply' at 0.0802, plus 'Merchant Function' at 0.002904 and 'ESRM' at 0.066069, hit equals and the total is 0.1492009 per kilowatt hour," Marty said. "What's ESRM? Ergregious Sinful Ripoff Metric?" (Actually ESRM is defined by the utility as Electricity Supply Reconciliation Mechanism - to reconcile electricity supply revenues for the month with the market cost of electricity - The Copy Desk).
     "Fourteen cents a kilowatt hour, there's got to be a mistake somewhere," Marty said. The boys decided to check the electric meter outside, but aside from hurting Marty's tail as Warren held it to keep Marty from falling, nothing was accomplished.
     "Last month's electric rate was just 0.0718846 and back in September we paid even less, 0.0692497," Marty said after burrowing down into the paid bills folder. Then Marty remembered that last year he switched the summer burrow over to another electricity supplier and took the all-windpower option. It was more expensive, but the summer burrow doesn't use much power and it wouldn't really cost that much more.
     "Hey, the price of windpower, one of those overpriced, Al Gore endorsed, government imposed renewable power supplies, is cheaper," Marty said. "The rate is 0.13375 and it hasn't changed since we switched over. (If the boys got all their power from the wind last month they would have saved about 13 clods on the power bill. But market forces only rarely push power rates above the fixed price of windpower, still it's interested that sometimes, wind is competitive - The Copy Desk)
     "We can pay the bill this month, but we'll have to cut back if we're going to be able to buy pants at some point," Marty said.

     (So to pay the Irrational Greed bill and continue saving up to buy pants, the boys did the only thing they could think of . . . . - The Copy Desk)

Warren and Marty freezing in the dark.