Sacramento Municipal Util Dist electricity rates

It serves 592,557 residential customers, making it one of the larger utilities in California. At 17.87¢ per kilowatt-hour it is one of the cheaper places to buy electricity in California, 46.3% under the statewide average of 33.25¢.

Consumption here is below the national norm at 702 kilowatt-hours a month against 871, which softens the effect of the rate on the final bill.

A public body created by the state or county, governed by an elected or appointed board rather than by shareholders. 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 Sacramento Municipal Util Dist customer went 228 minutes without electricity across 1.43 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.

Sacramento Municipal Util Dist offers time-of-use pricing and critical peak pricing to residential customers. 576,477 households were enrolled, about 97.3% 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.

57,003 residential customers had net-metered solar in 2024, totalling 257.4 megawatts. That works out to 96.2 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.