City of Pasadena electricity rates

It serves 58,551 residential customers in California. At 25.98¢ per kilowatt-hour it is one of the cheaper places to buy electricity in California, 21.9% under the statewide average of 33.25¢.

Its customers use very little electricity by national standards, 476 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 Pasadena customer went 43 minutes without electricity across 0.45 interruptions. The median across the 941 utilities that report this is 185 minutes.

That is markedly better than typical. Short outage durations usually mean an underground or heavily automated network, and they are expensive to achieve, which is part of why reliable systems often carry higher delivery charges.

City of Pasadena offers time-of-use pricing to residential customers. 49 households were enrolled, about 0.1% of its residential base.

These plans are opt-in almost everywhere. They reward households that can move laundry, dishwashing, water heating or electric vehicle charging out of the late-afternoon peak, and they cost more than the standard rate for households that cannot. How to tell which group you are in.

2,800 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 16.21 megawatts. That works out to 47.8 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.