Public utilities provide electric, gas, water or telephone service to customers in a specified area. Utilities have a duty to provide safe and adequate service on reasonable terms to anyone who lives within the service area on without discriminating between customers. Because most utilities operate in near monopolistic conditions, they can be heavily regulated by local, state, and federal authorities. Generally, the local and state agencies are called Public Service Commissions (PSC) or Public Utility Commissions (PUC). Municipal Utilities and Rural Electric Cooperatives may be unregulated though.
Stanford is a census-designated place (CDP) in Santa Clara County, California, United States. The population was 13,315 at the 2000 census. Stanford is an unincorporated area of Santa Clara County and is adjacent to the city of Palo Alto. Stanford, California is a valid postal address, and has its own post office and ZIP codes: 94305 (campus buildings) and 94309 (post-office boxes). A popular site to see/hike in Stanford is the Dish. The CDP of Stanford is mostly made up of Stanford University. Its resident population consists of the inhabitants of on-campus housing, including graduate student villages and the "Faculty Ghetto" of single-family homes owned by their faculty inhabitants but located on leased Stanford land. A residential neighborhood adjacent to the Stanford campus, College Terrace, featuring streets named after universities and colleges, including Oxford, Harvard, and Columbia, is not part of the Stanford CDP but of the city of Palo Alto.