City of Palo Alto electricity rates

It is a smaller system, serving 26,249 residential customers, which means its fixed costs are spread across a narrow base. At 20.67¢ per kilowatt-hour it is one of the cheaper places to buy electricity in California, 37.8% under the statewide average of 33.25¢.

Its customers use very little electricity by national standards, 501 kilowatt-hours a month against 871 nationally. Dense housing, a mild climate or heating that runs on gas rather than electricity all push consumption down, and any of them can leave a household with a modest bill despite a high rate.

Owned by the city it serves and governed by a local board rather than the state commission. No shareholder return is built into the rate. That matters because a bill is not only the cost of generating electricity: it also carries the cost of the network, and who owns that network changes how it is paid for.

In 2024 the average City of Palo Alto customer went 135 minutes without electricity across 0.88 interruptions. The median across the 941 utilities that report this is 185 minutes.

That is better than the typical American utility, though the figure includes major storm days and can move sharply from one year to the next.

1,702 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 9.8 megawatts. That works out to 64.8 installations per thousand customers, against a median of 8 across the utilities reporting it.

Adoption here is exceptionally high. That usually means some combination of a high retail rate worth displacing, strong sunshine and favourable export rules, and it tends to bring its own regulatory argument about who covers the fixed cost of the network. What exports are actually worth.