I wish I as a consumer could pay wholesale prices! Naturally, there is a whole cottage industry, namely consumer energy market, trying to trick us into overpaying.

Yeah, well in fairness there are other costs... But a lot of it is to pay for the middle men and they mostly exist because of Thatcher.

When she privatised electricity they split it into like a dozen different markets (supply, transport, retail, metering, billing, etc.) and coordinating all of those companies is insanely complicated and expensive.