Who Is My Electricity Provider in Los Angeles?

The City of Los Angeles runs its own, the Department of Water and Power, and most of the rest of the county is Southern California Edison. Seven smaller cities run utilities of their own.

One of them is not a city utility in the ordinary sense. Edison is an investor-owned utility regulated by the state, and it covers more of the county than everybody else put together. The other eight are departments of the cities they serve, which is why the answer to "who do I call" is sometimes city hall.

A ZIP code is a postal route and it crosses city lines. Mail addressed "Los Angeles" reaches unincorporated pockets the city does not govern, and most of the San Fernando Valley is inside the city under names like Van Nuys and Canoga Park. Your electric provider is decided by which city you are in, so the city line is the thing to establish first.

Two of the eight city utilities serve less than their whole city, by their own account, and the check above says so when it names them. Cerritos describes its utility as supplying businesses, with Edison still transmitting the electricity. The City of Industry says its system serves portions of the city's business and residential properties, and its own page tells Edison customers to ring Edison.

Four of the nine publish an answer. The table is what each one asks for in its own words, and it is worth reading before moving day rather than on it: two of the four want a Social Security number for whoever the account is in, and one of them will not start an account without it.

None of the four says whether somebody has to be at the home when the power goes on. Two of them do say when the work happens, which is the closest any of them comes: Pasadena connects Monday to Friday between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., and Azusa schedules a field visit. Ask when you apply, because it decides whether you need to be there on moving day.

Burbank, Glendale, Vernon, Cerritos and Industry publish none of this. Their numbers are further down, and nothing here guesses on their behalf: every relocation site prints a confident list of what to bring, some of it is right for some utilities, and a wrong list is worse than no list when you are standing in an empty apartment.

LADWP's own Rules Governing Water and Electric Service say a Start Service Charge is collected from every applicant for water or electric service, and that the General Manager sets the amount from time to time. The amount is not in the rules and it is not on the department's rates pages, so ask for it when you apply rather than trusting a figure from anywhere else.

Edison is the other way round on the deposit: its own FAQ says it is not currently billing deposits for residential customers, and that the figure it would use is two times the average monthly billing over the last twelve months.

Clean Power Alliance is a public agency formed by its member governments to buy electricity on their residents' behalf. It lists 36 cities and the unincorporated areas of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, 27 of those cities being in this county. You were enrolled because your city joined, not because you signed anything.

You can leave Clean Power Alliance and stay with Edison. Its own page says that opting out inside your first 60 days of service returns you to Edison on the next meter read after five business days, that an opt-out can be rescinded within 3 business days, and that either way you cannot rejoin for twelve months.

Where a city is not on that list, this page says only that Clean Power Alliance does not list it. It does not say nobody buys your power: other cities in the county run aggregators of their own, and the utility that bills you is the one that knows which.

Water almost never comes from whoever sells you electricity, and in most of the county it is a third account to open. Some of it is a city department, some a county waterworks district, and some an investor-owned water company.

The City of Los Angeles is the exception that trips people up: the Department of Water and Power is both, so one account covers the power and the water.

The check below names the water system from the State Water Board's own boundary layer, which carries a verification status per boundary set by its Division of Drinking Water.

The names it returns are the Water Board's own, abbreviations and all, because they are how a system identifies itself on a bill. "California Water Service Co. - ELA" is the East Los Angeles district of an investor-owned water company, and a name beginning "Los Angeles CWWD" is a County waterworks district rather than anything the city runs.

Five of the nine answer these questions by telephone only. These are the numbers the Energy Commission records for them, alongside the page each utility keeps about its own service.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is in the Energy Commission's electric layer with a polygon over most of Southern California. It is a water wholesaler, it supplies no household's electricity, and this page never names it as a provider.