Electricity

Electrical power in Mohave County (all of northwestern Arizona) is provided by Citizen's Utility, a company that started (and is headquartered) in a north-eastern state. Besides electricity, C.U. also provides the telephone service, the natural gas distribution (in a limited area) and they have a cellular phone division.

Electrical service does not extend everywhere here in Golden Valley - it is being expanded every year. The rules they were going by when we applied for power were that they would furnish power for free (actually a nominal connect fee) if your service requirements were within 500 feet of the existing power grid. Beyond that, they would extend the service to you for so much per foot (I believe in our case it ran $3.44 per foot).

You make application to Citizen's Utility (with deposit) for power and they will determine what is needed to hook you up. They will plan the job but they won't schedule it until all your inspections (Local, County & State) are completed. It was our experience that the folks that bring you electricity were the most efficient and helpful of any we dealt with at Citizen's Utility. They seemed competent and confident, they had a pretty aggressive schedule and they seemed to be able to accomplish quite a lot.

We also find that the rates here are not out of line. That may be because we come from one of the worst scenarios you can face with regard to someone who furnishes electrical power: Austin, Texas. There the power grid is owned by the city. If the city council raises taxes more than a small percentage in any one year there is an automatic recall built into the city charter. And politicians are the same the world over: For years they would raise taxes as far as they could without triggering the automatic recall and then, instead of lowering spending, they would raise electrical rates to make up the shortfall. Guess what that did to rates, over time?

About the only negative we've found with electrical power here is that the power is really "dirty". We have a lot of power failures - surges, brown-outs and total failures. Usually they are of very short duration (in the seconds) but it has forced us to buy UPS's (Uninterruptable Power Supply's) for our computers. We lost the operating systems on both our computers before we figured out what was going on.