Yes, I pay all my bills by bank transfer (house, electric, internet, settlements with friends etc). It's the most common payment method here (I'm in Europe).
PayPal et al are barely used here because the bank transfer system is free and frictionless.
I'm guessing, but I think most people probably give the electric company permission to pull the money from their account (direct debit) rather than reviewing the bill and "pushing" the money every time.
There are very strong guarantees in the individual's favour if the company makes a mistake.
Although, you need your bank to actually fulfil the guarantee, depending on how terrible your bank's customer service is, this may be a lot of trouble.
I've actually done this (use the DD Guarantee to unwind bill payments I didn't want paid) with my good bank and it was a pleasure, no trouble at all. But I can imagine that a bank with bad customer service is going to make it a nightmare that will suck up hours of your life.
Yes, having them control the amount and timing of the transfer is exactly what I am trying to avoid. I can easily set up direct debit, but it has led to too many erroneous and poorly timed withdrawals.
In Sweden we have an e-billing system where your bills show up as PDFs in your internet bank and then you hit accept or deny (and they go in a queue to pay on either the due date or a date you pick). You can also set it to auto-accept new bills from the same company if you want to emulate how direct debit works (with the added benefit of having a period of time between the bill coming in and the due date to verify the amount is right)
If you want to stick to paper bills, they all have the receiving account number and customer reference number so they can be paid manually via a transfer.
In the Netherlands, we had that for some time but sadly it didn't catch on with the utility companies, housing associations, insurers etc., and has been discontinued. I would love such a central place to manage my bills and pay them on my own time instead of using direct debit which most of them nudge us to use now by introducing costs for other payment methods.
In the UK, larger companies usually allowed a choice of the date the payment went out. (After all, they'd rather not deal with failed payments.)
I keep enough money in my accounts (partly because of this) that I don't really care about it, but I'd be surprised if they don't use the preferred date.
This company is easily large enough that their bank details are already listed in online banking systems. You can choose "Pay a bill", then select "Southern Energy" rather than type in those account details.
PayPal et al are barely used here because the bank transfer system is free and frictionless.