Palo Alto Electrician.
Eichler-Smart, CPAU-Certified, Foothill-Aware.

Yes — Cali Rollin Electric regularly serves Palo Alto and is familiar with every part of the city, including the Professorville and Old Palo Alto historic districts, the Greenmeadow and Royal Manor Eichler tracts, Crescent Park along San Francisquito Creek, Fairmeadow, the College Terrace / Stanford-adjacent neighborhoods, Midtown, Barron Park, and the foothill properties along Page Mill Road and Alexis Drive. We handle panel upgrades, FPE and Zinsco replacement, EV charger installation, Eichler retrofit electrical, whole-house rewiring, generator and battery storage installation, and emergency electrical response. C-10 License #1144031.

The City of Palo Alto Utilities (CPAU) is the electric utility for every residential and commercial customer inside Palo Alto city limits. CPAU has operated the city's electric system continuously since 1896 and has supplied 100% carbon-neutral electricity since 2013. CPAU is the only provider — there is no PG&E and no Community Choice Aggregator layer for Palo Alto. PG&E serves East Palo Alto and the 94303 ZIP code, but East Palo Alto is a separate municipality and is not the City of Palo Alto. For panel upgrades, service changes, and new connections, our team coordinates directly with CPAU — not PG&E.

Yes — almost every electrical project beyond like-for-like fixture swaps requires a permit from the City of Palo Alto Development Services (285 Hamilton Ave, 1st Floor, 650-329-2496). What is unusual about Palo Alto is that the City handles both the building inspection AND, through CPAU, the utility-side coordination — the AIC (Available Interrupting Capacity) rating, disconnect / reconnect scheduling, and final meter approval all flow through CPAU rather than PG&E. Trade permits for residential electrical typically take 5 to 15 business days for initial review; full residential permits run 15 to 30 business days. Status can be tracked through the City's Palo Alto Permit View tool. Permit fees fall in the $500 – $1,000 range depending on jurisdiction. We file on your behalf and coordinate every inspection.

Because CPAU acts as both the utility AND the interconnecting authority. In PG&E-served cities, the contractor coordinates with PG&E for disconnect / reconnect, AIC rating, and meter work, and with the city for the building permit. In Palo Alto, both sides of that process run through City of Palo Alto departments. Concretely: the AIC rating on the service application comes from CPAU Electrical Engineering (650-566-4500), not PG&E. Disconnect and reconnect is coordinated through CPAU Electric Operations (650-496-6914). Final approval requires inspection by both CPAU (650-496-5934) AND the CPA Building Division (650-329-2496) before the meter is reconnected. CPAU requires socket-type meters only. In heavily canopied neighborhoods — Old Palo Alto, Crescent Park, Professorville, College Terrace — mast riser and overhead service drop work also requires Urban Forestry coordination (650-496-5953). Competitors rarely surface this; our team runs it for every Palo Alto service-side job.

Palo Alto retains roughly 2,200 Eichler homes out of an original 2,700 — the largest single-city Eichler concentration in the country. Greenmeadow and Green Gables are both listed on the National Register of Historic Places as historic Eichler districts; Royal Manor inside the Palo Verde neighborhood holds another ~200 Eichlers. These homes are slab-on-grade with subsurface EMT conduit running through the slab, no attic or crawl-space access, post-and-beam roofs, atrium plans, original 60A to 100A service, and frequently no equipment ground at the receptacles. Modern circuits — EV charger, heat pump, induction range, smart electrical panel — typically have to route over the roof or be picked up at the base of the slab rather than fished through walls. Radiant floor heat is a leak risk that can corrode subsurface EMT over decades. Our team plans Eichler retrofits around the architecture: ground retrofit to bring receptacles up to current code, atrium circuit replacement where the irrigation has been on the same circuit for fifty years, panel upgrade sized for the homeowner's electrification roadmap. CPAU has even hosted a How to Electrify an Eichler webinar — the City recognizes this as a distinct trade specialty. C-10 #1144031.

Yes — FPE Stab-Lok and Zinsco panel replacement is one of our highest-volume jobs across Palo Alto. Federal Pacific Stab-Lok panels (1950–1990) and Zinsco / GTE-Sylvania panels (1963–1981) are common in 1950s through 1970s Palo Alto housing — both the Eichler tracts and conventional mid-century neighborhoods. California home-insurance carriers now refuse to write or renew policies on homes with these panels, so replacement is often driven by an insurer's letter rather than a code violation. Every replacement is permitted, the AIC rating is pulled from CPAU Electrical Engineering, and the CPAU disconnect / reconnect is coordinated by our team — you do not make those calls.

Yes — Level 2 EV charger installation is one of our most common Palo Alto requests. As of 2021, roughly one in six Palo Alto households owned an EV (CPAU), and the number has grown since. We install Level 2 chargers for Tesla, Rivian, Ford, ChargePoint, Emporia, Grizzl-E, and every other major brand. Installation requires a dedicated 240V circuit and a permit through City of Palo Alto Development Services. Many Palo Alto homes — particularly the Eichler tracts and older Professorville / Crescent Park stock — still run on 60A to 100A service and need a panel upgrade and CPAU service entrance coordination before a dedicated EV circuit can be added. We scope both at the on-site assessment. Several CPAU rebate programs and the federal 30C credit may apply — see the Rebate Programs section below.

Yes — roughly 130 homes in the western Palo Alto foothills along Moody Road, Alexis Drive, and the Page Mill Road corridor are inside a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone (VHFHSZ). The Page Mill corridor experiences significant Diablo wind exposure during Red Flag conditions, and CPAU initiated a foothill undergrounding project in 2025 to convert overhead lines to underground and reduce ignition risk. We install whole-house standby generators with automatic transfer switches and residential battery storage systems that can carry critical loads through extended outages. Installations are scoped for defensible-space compliance, WUI Chapter 7A awareness, and CPAU coordination on the service side. Flatland Palo Alto — Old Palo Alto, Professorville, Crescent Park, Greenmeadow — is not in a fire hazard severity zone, so the foothill scope only applies to the western hillside parcels.

Several CPAU programs apply: the CPAU Rebate Hub portal covers heat pump HVAC, heat pump water heater, panel upgrade, and utility service capacity fee rebates for EV charger upgrades. The Electrify My Home program provides planning and contractor referrals. The Residential Energy Assistance Program (REAP) offers income-qualified support including a panel upgrade permit-fee rebate. On the federal side, the 30C EV Charger Credit is currently active through June 30, 2026 — up to $1,000 for a residential install, but the credit requires the property to be in a low-income or non-urban census tract, and most Palo Alto addresses are urban and will not qualify. Always verify per-address eligibility before relying on it. Several other federal residential energy credits expired at the end of 2025 and are no longer available — program rules change quickly, so we link directly to the official CPAU and IRS pages and customers should verify current eligibility before committing.

For true electrical emergencies — burning smells, active sparks, panel arcing, main breaker failure — call 408-614-4451. We prioritize same-day dispatch to Palo Alto for urgent safety situations. For non-emergency power outages and repairs, same-day or next-day scheduling is typically available. You reach our team directly — not a dispatch center or a national franchise call queue.