I don ' t live in Scotland but they have this in England too . Our electric was provided by Utilita . You get two cards . One for gas and one for electric . You take them to the shop most newsagents have the right stuff and ask for for instance 10 on the electric card and they ' ll take the money and put it onto the card . You then go home and press a series of numbers into your electric meter , and it puts the power back on . 10 lasts about 5 days of a normal families electric use . If you ' re about to run out of money on one of the cards , there ' s a small unit that starts beeping incessantly until you type in another set of numbers . Some companies provided emergency credit for the cards . This meant that if you ran out of credit on one of the cards after 5 pm and before 11 am , or at the weekend , they ' d leave the power on so you ' d have time to go and top up . Sorry for formatting , im in mobile and its 7 am here so I ' m really tired