Silicon Valley Power-City of Santa Clara

Horrible experience. I was not getting any bill for past 2 months, not in emails nor in postal mails. I pay nearly 20 bills every month so either I rely on recurring payments or emails to remind me about. For this one I did not opt for recurring payment, somewhere I didn’t feel good about this company from my past interactions and had BAD experiences in past with utility companies like PG&E.
I called to customer service and explained my case. I did sign up for paperless billing and alerts, but I received none. And instead of acknowledging the errors in their system and be accommodating to customers, they are expecting that I should check bills every month by visiting their website!!! What the heck? They charged me $ 60 for late payment and 48 our shut-​off notice. Luckily I was reading a news article about electricity, and it occurred to me that I am not getting any electricity bills since many days. So checked the website and found that today was the shut off day! And it’s not that they aren’t aware about the issue, both of the customer reps I talked with suggested me to untick and tick alert and paperless billing options once again.
Oh! For crying out loud, send me the bill first before you expect a payment.
This is the worst electric company I have every dealt with. No customer respect and not having a sense of understanding. Their website totally sucks, it’s pathetic!

SVP failed to turn off my utilities upon moving out of my apartment despite proper notification, and continued to charge me for 3 months before finally disconnecting the power.
Since they also failed to update my new address their billing went to the prior address and was submitted to collections. Eventually collections found my new address and I put forward a dispute. I paid collections and the company put the only bad star on my credit history.
Unfortunately, I am obligated to use them again, since I have moved back to Santa Clara. This time around they have charged me three separate deposits on three separate bills, in the same month, labeled as «miscellaneous» with no clear explanation of the charge for 80 $, 150 $, and a trivial 2.5 $.
This is a terrible service and their whole staff should be fired.
UPDATE: The business lost track of the 80 $ and 2.5 $ charges, and are unaware of where they were credited to.
UPDATE: The business contacted me and corrected the charges. They also provided the means to remove their bad mark from my credit. I moved my rating from 1 star to 2 stars.

What a horrible phone experience. I called and was abruptly put on hold by a male employee. Then after minutes of silence I said hello, and received a response from a customer that was placed on hold as well, but no response from the employee. After a brief disscussion the customer and I decided to call back at different times to avoid this percieved accident from happening again. What happened next proves it wasn’t an accidental mishap, but a customer prank performed by the employees. When I called back a lady employee picked up and was histarically laughing, I awkwardly waited for her to stop so I could ask to pay my bill, but halfway through me talking she interrupted me with her loud laughing. I waited once again for her to stop laughing, then she started to ask what I needed when she once again could not finish her sentence because she was laughing so hard. I finally said she was being extremely unprofessional, and her response as she was still laughing was“yeah I know, were bad”. I then told her I would call back later to speak to someone else, and her response was «No, I’ll help you now.» I then hung up the phone shocked with this horrendous customer service, and now I’m writing this review. I’m in my late twenties and never felt the need to get a Unilocal account, but because this service was so unnacceptable I decided to open an account just to leave this review. Based on the other reviews, Silicon Power does a great job with their service, but these two employees deserve to be reprimanded by disciplinary actions, otherwise Silicon Valley Power will continue to get bad reviews just because two unprofessional employees.

I had an issue with my online account not grating me access to to the payment center so I gave customer service a call. A nice gentleman answered and let me know that they were doing a system update and emailed me a new access code. He even stayed on the phone while I tried to access my account again!
So, on top of the prices being significantly less than PG&E, Silicon Valley Power has great customer service! I’m only giving four stars though because there is a downside to a smaller city having its own power source –the website doesn’t always work correctly. I can’t access my online account right now so it looks like I’m going to need to make another call to get access again…

without my permission, this company added another person into my account.
What a violation!
they must be crazy.

Silicon Valley Power provides my electricity and water, while PG&E provides my gas. I like the usage bar graphs included in my statements from SVP. My husband and I opted to spend a few extra dollars a month and sign up for «green power». It feels good to be helping the environment.
On the down side, it is simply unacceptable to have «Silicon Valley» in your name and not accept online payments. Their phone payment system is horribly cumbersome. I signed up for auto-​payments by sending them a voided check, but it’s been more than a month and it still hasn’t processed. And unlike PG&E, they are strict about their due dates; you will be charged $ 5 for the first day it’s overdue. It reminds me of the good old days of video rental.