What do you think electrical energy actually is? For what do you pay electric bill ?
You don’t necessarily *have* to pay for electricity. You could go find some metal bearing rock and mine your own ore, smelt it yourself, draw the wire and forge the housings. Weld up a frame and make your own generator. It could be human-powered. And voila; free electricity. No much (about enough to run a laptop for half a day) but free. Except for your cost of food.
Or you could pay someone else to do all those things.
Or you could share the cost of making an even bigger generator (or generation system) with the rest of your extended community for an equitable share of the electricity generated.