CPAU - City of Palo Alto Utilities Data Access

A Python library and CLI tools for downloading electric and water meter data from the City of Palo Alto Utilities (CPAU) customer portal.

Overview

This library provides programmatic access to your historical electricity and water usage data from CPAU’s customer portals:

Electric meter data: From the CPAU customer portal
Water meter data: From the WaterSmart portal

Since CPAU doesn’t provide a public API, this library reverse-engineers the web portals’ internal APIs to retrieve your data programmatically.

Features

✅ Python Library: Clean, pythonic API for accessing CPAU data in your applications

✅ CLI Tools: Command-line interfaces for electric (cpau-electric) and water (cpau-water) data

✅ Multiple Intervals: Billing periods, monthly, daily, hourly, and 15-minute data

✅ CSV Output: Standard CSV format for easy data analysis

✅ Type Hints: Full type annotations for better IDE support

✅ Cookie Caching: Fast authentication (~1s) for repeated water meter queries

Quick Start

Installation

pip install cpau

# For water meter support, install Playwright browser
playwright install chromium

Set Up Credentials

Create a secrets.json file with your CPAU login credentials:

{
    "userid": "your_email@example.com",
    "password": "your_password"
}

⚠️ Important: Never commit this file to version control.

CLI Usage

# Electric meter - get daily usage
cpau-electric --interval daily 2024-12-01 2024-12-31 > electric_daily.csv

# Water meter - get hourly usage
cpau-water --interval hourly 2024-12-01 2024-12-31 > water_hourly.csv

Library Usage

from cpau import CpauApiSession
from datetime import date

# Electric meter
with CpauApiSession(userid='your_email', password='your_password') as session:
    meter = session.get_electric_meter()
    data = meter.get_usage(
        interval='daily',
        start_date=date(2024, 12, 1),
        end_date=date(2024, 12, 31)
    )

    for record in data:
        print(f"{record.date}: {record.net_kwh} kWh")