A power outage knocked out electricity to roughly 1,800 customers across five South Palo Alto neighborhoods yesterday, prompting the city’s utility to dispatch crews to troubleshoot the failure and begin restoring service. The affected areas span Palo Verde, Greenmeadow, Charleston Terrace, Fairmeadow and Midtown, according to a report from the city.
The City of Palo Alto announced the outage in a post on X, writing that crews had been sent out to investigate and restore power, and that City of Palo Alto Utilities, known as CPAU, was actively tracking the disruption. As reported by the City of Palo Alto, the utility promised to share additional information as it became available, though the exact cause of the outage had not been identified as of Wednesday night.
There is a current power outage impacting customers in Palo Verde, Greenmeadow, Charleston Terrace, Fairmeadow and Midtown. https://t.co/aW41t7viI7https://t.co/cBc93NqszM
— City of Palo Alto (@cityofpaloalto) August 20, 2026
CPAU is the only municipal utility in California that delivers six full services directly to residents, including electricity, natural gas, water, sewer, fiber optic and storm drain services, with its electric operation running continuously since 1900, according to the City of Palo Alto. That means the outage is being handled entirely by a public grid rather than an investor-owned utility like PG&E, which serves much of the rest of the Bay Area.
A Recurring Pattern in South Palo Alto
Wednesday’s blackout is not an isolated event for this stretch of the city. South Palo Alto neighborhoods have seen similar multi-neighborhood outages in recent years, including an equipment failure in August 2024 that cut power to 3,349 customers in Palo Verde and Midtown, and a shutoff in September 2022 that affected 1,700 residents, per the Palo Alto Daily Post’s report on the earlier incident. Hoodline covered a similar episode in December 2023, when a faulty transformer knocked out power to 4,500 customers before crews restored most of the service…