City of Santa Clara electricity rates

It serves 50,949 residential customers in California. At 16.88¢ per kilowatt-hour it is one of the cheaper places to buy electricity in California, 49.2% under the statewide average of 33.25¢.

Its customers use very little electricity by national standards, 425 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 Santa Clara customer went 209 minutes without electricity across 0.91 interruptions. The median across the 941 utilities that report this is 185 minutes.

That is worse than typical. Overhead lines through wooded or storm-exposed terrain are the usual explanation, and the fix is vegetation management and circuit automation, both of which are recovered through rates.

1,202 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 6.58 megawatts. That works out to 23.6 installations per thousand customers, against a median of 8 across the utilities reporting it.

Adoption is above the national median, which generally tracks the retail rate more closely than it tracks sunshine. What exports are actually worth.