SCE Rate Plans for Solar Owners in 2026: TOU-D-PRIME vs TOU-D-4-9PM vs TOU-D-5-8PM

The 2026 SCE Rate Landscape at a Glance

Southern California Edison serves roughly 15 million people across central, coastal, and southern California, including every home in Temecula Valley. For residential solar customers, SCE offers a small family of time-of-use rate schedules. The three that matter most in 2026 are TOU-D-PRIME, TOU-D-4-9PM, and TOU-D-5-8PM. Each one charges a different price per kilowatt-hour depending on what time of day you use power, and each one treats your exported solar energy differently under NEM 3.0.

The basic shape of all three plans is the same. There is a high-priced peak window in the late afternoon and evening, a lower-priced off-peak window the rest of the day, and a super off-peak window on certain hours. The differences live in where those peak hours fall, whether weekends count as peak, and whether you get a baseline credit that knocks dollars off the bottom of your bill.

For a homeowner with solar panels and a battery, the choice of rate plan is not a footnote. It is one of the three biggest levers on your annual bill, alongside system size and battery dispatch programming. Picking the right plan can be worth $300 to $1,200 per year compared to the default option, and over the 25-year life of a solar system that compounds into tens of thousands of dollars.

What makes 2026 different from previous years is the convergence of three forces. First, SCE rates have climbed faster than at any point in the last two decades, so the absolute dollar gap between plans has widened. Second, NEM 3.0 has fundamentally rewritten the rules of solar export economics, which changes how every plan should be evaluated. Third, battery storage has become standard equipment on new solar installs, which means most homeowners now have the dispatch flexibility to actually take advantage of time-based pricing.

For homeowners who installed solar before 2023, your rate plan choice may have been made under very different conditions. Plans that were optimal for you in 2020 or 2021 may be costing you hundreds of dollars per year today. The single most valuable 10-minute exercise you can do this year is audit your current SCE rate schedule and verify it still fits your situation. Most homeowners who do this discover they are on the wrong plan.

TOU-D-PRIME: The Plan Built for Electrified Homes

TOU-D-PRIME is SCE's flagship time-of-use plan for households that have made a real commitment to electrification. To qualify, your home must have at least one of the following: a behind-the-meter battery storage system, a permitted Level 2 electric vehicle charger, or an electric heat pump for space heating or water heating. Most Temecula solar plus battery homes qualify automatically.

The peak window on TOU-D-PRIME runs from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays. Weekends and holidays have a softer mid-peak window in the same hours rather than full peak pricing, which is a meaningful advantage if your family spends a lot of time at home Saturday and Sunday. Off-peak rates apply every other hour of the day.

The headline feature of TOU-D-PRIME is the baseline credit. SCE calculates a baseline allocation for your home based on climate zone and season, and if your total monthly usage stays within or near that allocation, you receive a per-kilowatt-hour credit applied against your bill. For a typical Temecula home in climate zone 10, the allocation is roughly 11 kWh per day in summer and 9 kWh per day in winter, with higher numbers if you are on the medical baseline.

For solar plus battery homeowners, TOU-D-PRIME is usually the strongest pick. The battery handles the 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. peak hours, the baseline credit offsets the remaining grid pull, and weekend mid-peak pricing protects you on the days you are home running the AC.

Specific 2026 rate ranges on TOU-D-PRIME look approximately like this for Temecula customers. Off-peak weekday pricing runs in the high 30s of cents per kilowatt-hour. Peak weekday pricing during the 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. window climbs into the 60s of cents per kilowatt-hour. Weekend mid-peak pricing during the same evening hours sits in the mid 40s. Super off-peak windows during the spring months drop into the high 20s. The baseline credit applied against eligible usage is roughly 9 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is meaningful when stacked against the underlying rates.

One quirk to know about TOU-D-PRIME is that the baseline credit calculation can flip on you if you significantly exceed your baseline allocation. The credit is structured so that homes operating well above baseline see diminishing returns, and at very high usage levels the effective rate can rise quickly. Solar plus battery customers rarely trigger this because the system covers the bulk of usage, but high-consumption homes with electric pool pumps, multiple HVAC zones, or hot tubs running constantly should model the math carefully.

TOU-D-4-9PM: The Open-Door Plan With the Same Peak Window

TOU-D-4-9PM has the same peak window as TOU-D-PRIME, 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays. The difference is that anyone can sign up. You do not need a battery, an EV charger, or a heat pump. This makes it the default TOU plan for households that have solar but no other electrification equipment, or for renters who do not control their water heater.

What you give up by choosing TOU-D-4-9PM instead of PRIME is the baseline credit. There is no per-kWh credit knocked off your bill. The base rates themselves are slightly different too, with TOU-D-4-9PM running a touch lower on off-peak and slightly higher on peak compared to PRIME's underlying rate structure.

For a solar-only home with no battery, TOU-D-4-9PM is often the right choice because you cannot fully avoid grid usage during peak hours anyway. The lower off-peak rate helps on the hours when your panels are not producing, and you are not penalized for failing to meet a baseline you cannot realistically hit without storage.

TOU-D-4-9PM is also a reasonable holding pattern for homeowners who plan to add a battery or EV charger within the next year but have not yet done the installation. You can sit on TOU-D-4-9PM, accumulate the time-based discipline, and then make the single allowed annual switch to TOU-D-PRIME once your qualifying equipment is in place. This avoids burning your annual switch on a plan move you would have made anyway.

TOU-D-5-8PM: The Compressed Peak Window

TOU-D-5-8PM is SCE's legacy three-hour peak plan. The peak window runs from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., which is a tighter target than the five-hour window on the other two plans. In exchange for the compressed window, the per-kilowatt-hour peak rate itself is higher than what you see on TOU-D-PRIME or TOU-D-4-9PM.

Weekends are treated differently on TOU-D-5-8PM. The plan applies a softer pricing schedule on Saturday and Sunday, generally without a full peak window at all, which makes it attractive for households that are away during the week and home on weekends. Off-peak hours dominate the rest of the schedule.

For solar plus battery owners, TOU-D-5-8PM can work mathematically if your battery is sized to fully cover those three peak hours and you have an aggressive export strategy. But the high peak rate cuts both ways. If your battery runs out of juice at 7 p.m. and you have to pull from the grid for the last hour of peak, you pay a steep premium. The math gets tight fast.

How Each Plan Interacts With NEM 3.0 Export Credits

Under NEM 3.0, the value of every kilowatt-hour you export to the grid is set by SCE's Avoided Cost Calculator, which publishes hourly export rates that change throughout the year. The headline number you have probably seen is that midday export credits collapsed from around 30 cents per kilowatt-hour under NEM 2.0 to roughly 5 cents per kilowatt-hour under NEM 3.0. What is less talked about is that evening export rates, during the 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. peak window, can spike well above 30 cents per kilowatt-hour on hot summer evenings.

This is where rate plan choice and battery dispatch programming intersect with NEM 3.0 in a way that completely changes the economics. If you can hold solar energy in your battery all day and discharge it to the grid during the 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. window, you are arbitraging a 5-cent input against a 35-cent or higher output. That is the entire game under NEM 3.0.

TOU-D-PRIME and TOU-D-4-9PM both have peak windows that line up with the highest export credit hours, which makes them the natural fit for batteries programmed to export during peak. TOU-D-5-8PM has a narrower peak window that still aligns with the highest export hours, so the export arbitrage logic still works, but you have fewer hours to spread the discharge across.

One nuance worth understanding is that the Avoided Cost Calculator export values are not flat across the peak window. They typically peak somewhere between 5:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on hot summer evenings and taper off in the hours on either side. A sophisticated battery dispatch program will pace the discharge to weight more energy toward those highest-value hours rather than discharging evenly across the entire peak window.

Most current-generation batteries can do this automatically if you enable their advanced dispatch modes. Tesla Powerwall has a feature called Advanced Time-Based Control that handles this. Enphase IQ batteries pair with Storage Profiles. Franklin Home Power has a similar capability through its app. If your battery installer set you up on basic time-based control without enabling the advanced features, you may be leaving 5 to 10 percent of your potential savings on the table.

Why Peak Hours Matter So Much for Solar Self-Consumption

The phrase you hear from solar installers over and over is self-consumption. It means using the energy your panels produce in your own home rather than exporting it to the grid. Self-consumption used to be a nice-to-have under NEM 2.0, when export credits were generous. Under NEM 3.0, it is the difference between a solar system that pays back in seven years and one that pays back in fourteen.

Here is the practical reality in Temecula. Your panels produce most of their daily energy between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., which is the off-peak window under every SCE TOU plan. Your family probably uses most of its energy between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., the peak window. Without a battery, you are giving SCE cheap energy during the day and buying expensive energy back at night. The battery is the bridge, and the rate plan determines how wide that bridge needs to be.

A peak window that runs five hours, like the one on TOU-D-PRIME or TOU-D-4-9PM, means your battery needs enough capacity to cover roughly 15 to 20 kilowatt-hours of evening usage. A peak window that runs three hours, like the one on TOU-D-5-8PM, drops that to roughly 8 to 12 kilowatt-hours. The shorter window is easier to cover, but the price you pay per missed hour is higher.

Battery Dispatch Programming for Each Rate Plan

Modern home batteries from Tesla, Enphase, Franklin, and SunPower all have multiple operating modes. The two that matter for rate plan optimization are time-based control and self-consumption. Time-based control tells the battery to charge during off-peak hours, discharge during peak hours, and prioritize either savings or backup based on your preferences.

On TOU-D-PRIME, the optimal dispatch is to charge from solar between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., hold the charge through the off-peak afternoon hours, and discharge aggressively from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays. On weekends, you can shift to self-consumption mode because mid-peak pricing is gentler.

On TOU-D-4-9PM, the dispatch logic is nearly identical to PRIME, with the same 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. discharge window. The only adjustment is that weekend peak hours apply too, so you should keep the battery in time-based mode seven days a week rather than switching to self-consumption on Saturday and Sunday.

On TOU-D-5-8PM, the dispatch needs to be more aggressive. Your battery should be at full charge by 4:30 p.m., discharge hard from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., and prioritize export during those three hours if you have headroom. Weekend dispatch can fall back to self-consumption mode.

One programming detail that matters across all three plans is the reserve threshold. Most batteries let you set a minimum state of charge to hold for backup purposes, typically 20 to 30 percent. The lower you set this reserve, the more capacity you have available to dispatch against peak hours, but the less backup protection you have if the grid goes down. In Temecula and the surrounding fire areas, where Public Safety Power Shutoffs are an annual reality, most installers recommend keeping at least 30 percent reserve through fire season and dropping it to 10 to 20 percent during the cooler months.

Battery dispatch is not a set-it-and-forget-it exercise. Your home's energy usage patterns shift season by season, the SCE peak hour structure shifts between summer and winter, and your export credit values change month by month under NEM 3.0. Reviewing your dispatch settings every three to four months is a reasonable cadence, and most battery apps make this straightforward to do from your phone.

The Duck Curve Effect on Solar Export Value

California's electricity grid has a problem nicknamed the duck curve. It refers to the shape of net demand on the grid throughout the day, which dips deeply in the middle of the day as millions of solar systems pour energy onto the wires, then ramps sharply upward in the early evening as the sun sets and air conditioners stay on. The shape looks like a duck's back when you graph it.

The duck curve is the underlying reason midday export credits collapsed under NEM 3.0. There is simply too much solar energy on the grid during those hours, and SCE has no efficient way to store or move it elsewhere. Meanwhile, the evening ramp from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. is when grid operators are scrambling to meet demand with expensive natural gas peaker plants. Every kilowatt-hour exported during that window is genuinely valuable to SCE, and the Avoided Cost Calculator reflects that.

What this means for you in 2026 is that your solar panels alone are no longer a financial product. They are a generation asset that produces a low-value commodity unless you can shift the delivery time. The battery is the device that does the shifting, and the rate plan is the contract that determines how much the shift is worth.

The duck curve also has a seasonal dimension that affects rate plan choice. During spring months, when temperatures are mild and solar production is high, the midday oversupply problem on the grid is at its worst. Export credits during these months can fall to nearly zero, sometimes even negative on certain hours where the grid is pleading with generators to stop producing. During summer evenings, the opposite happens. Export credits spike to their annual highs because the evening ramp from cooling load is severe and the sun has already set. The seasonal swing in export value is one of the reasons annual rate plan reviews matter more than they used to.

Domestic Rate vs TOU: Why Domestic Is Almost Never Right for Solar Owners

SCE also offers a non-TOU rate called Schedule D, often just called Domestic. It charges a tiered price per kilowatt-hour with no time-of-use component. Tier 1 is cheaper, Tier 2 kicks in once you exceed a threshold, and there is no peak hour premium.

For a non-solar home with modest usage, Schedule D can be the cheapest option. For a solar home, it is almost always the wrong choice. The reason is that Schedule D has no mechanism to reward you for shifting energy use into low-cost hours or for exporting during high-value evening hours. You also miss out on the entire economic logic of NEM 3.0, because the Avoided Cost Calculator is most generous during the hours that only TOU plans recognize.

If you currently have solar and you are on Schedule D, that is the first rate plan audit to do. Most solar customers default to a TOU schedule when their system is energized, but some homes that added solar later end up stuck on D by accident.

The reverse case also exists. Homes that previously had solar under NEM 1.0 or NEM 2.0 and recently upgraded their system or added a battery may have been moved to a new interconnection agreement under NEM 3.0. The rate plan options open to you may have changed in the process. Verify your current interconnection version on your most recent True-Up statement before doing rate plan math, because the underlying export credit structure differs significantly between NEM versions.

How to Actually Switch Rate Plans

Switching plans is free and takes about 10 minutes. Log in to your SCE online account, navigate to Account Management, and find the section labeled Rate and Service Options. You will see your current plan listed along with a list of plans you are eligible to switch to. Click the plan you want and confirm.

Two important rules apply. First, you get one free rate plan switch per 12-month period. After that, you have to wait until the 12-month clock resets or pay an administrative fee. Second, once you switch to a new plan, you are locked into that plan for a minimum of 12 months. SCE will not let you bounce between plans monthly chasing the best rate.

If you cannot decide between two plans, SCE offers a tool called the Rate Comparison calculator that pulls your last 12 months of hourly usage data and shows you what each plan would have cost. This is the most reliable way to make the call, because it uses your actual usage rather than a model.

One subtle trap to avoid is that the Rate Comparison tool uses your historical usage from before you installed solar or added a battery. If your home's usage profile has recently changed because you bought an EV, added a heat pump, or just installed storage, the comparison will be misleading. In those cases, you want to project forward based on your new equipment rather than backward based on your old bills. A local solar installer who knows the SCE plan structure can usually run this forward projection for you.

SCE Bill Protection Rules for New TOU Customers

SCE offers bill protection for the first 12 months on a new TOU rate plan. The way it works is straightforward. At the end of your first 12 months on the new plan, SCE compares what you actually paid under the TOU plan against what you would have paid under your old rate plan. If the TOU plan cost you more, SCE refunds the difference as a bill credit.

This is a meaningful safety net for solar plus battery customers who are not sure whether their dispatch programming will perform as expected. You get a full year to tune your settings, learn how your house actually uses energy, and verify the savings before any downside risk lands on you.

Bill protection only applies to your first 12 months after switching. After that, you are on the plan at your own risk, which is why the rate plan audit is worth doing carefully the first time.

EV Owner Rate Considerations

If you own an electric vehicle, the rate plan math gets more complex because EV charging is large and time-flexible. A typical EV adds 200 to 400 kilowatt-hours per month to your home usage, which is enough to shift you between rate tiers and pricing zones.

SCE used to offer a dedicated EV rate called TOU-D-EV, but that plan has been retired and EV owners now choose between TOU-D-PRIME and TOU-D-4-9PM. TOU-D-PRIME is the stronger choice for most EV owners because the qualifying Level 2 charger satisfies the eligibility requirement and the baseline credit cushions the higher usage. The super off-peak window from midnight to 6 a.m. is when you want your EV charging, and both plans price that window cheaply.

For a household with solar, a battery, and an EV, TOU-D-PRIME is almost always the right answer in southwest Riverside County. The combination of weekday peak shaving, weekend mid-peak protection, baseline credit, and cheap overnight EV charging adds up to the lowest annual bill of any available plan.

Projected SCE Rate Increases Through 2027 and Beyond

SCE rates have risen sharply over the past five years. From 2021 through 2025, the average residential rate climbed from roughly 28 cents per kilowatt-hour to over 45 cents per kilowatt-hour, an increase of more than 60 percent. The drivers are wildfire mitigation costs, transmission upgrades, undergrounding programs, and the ongoing cost recovery from major wildfire settlements.

The California Public Utilities Commission has approved a multi-year rate trajectory that projects continued increases of 7 to 11 percent annually through 2027. Peak rates are expected to grow faster than off-peak rates because that is where SCE is most constrained on capacity.

What this means for solar plus battery economics is that your savings are growing every year automatically. A system that saves $2,400 in 2026 will likely save $2,700 in 2027 and over $3,000 in 2028, even if your usage stays exactly the same. Choosing the right rate plan amplifies this effect because peak rate increases hit harder than off-peak increases.

Wildfire mitigation is the single biggest line item driving rate increases. SCE has committed to undergrounding thousands of miles of distribution lines in high fire threat areas, including swaths of southwest Riverside County. The capital cost of this work is recovered through customer rates over multiple decades. Independent of whether you support the policy, the financial reality is that your rate is going up, and the gap between solar plus battery and the alternative is widening.

There is also a national context. California's rate structure is now among the highest in the country, with average residential rates running roughly twice the national average. The state's renewable energy mandate, battery storage targets, and transmission build-out plans all imply continued upward pressure. Locking in solar plus battery hardware today is a way to insulate yourself from a cost curve that shows no sign of bending.

Real-World Example: 8 kW Solar Plus 13.5 kWh Battery on Each Plan

To make this concrete, consider a Temecula home with a 8 kilowatt solar system, a 13.5 kilowatt-hour battery, and an annual usage of 14,000 kilowatt-hours. The home has a Level 2 EV charger and an electric water heater, so all three rate plans are available. We will run the math at 2026 rates.

On Schedule D, the annual electric bill comes in around $3,200. The home is using tiered rates with no time-shifting credit, and the battery is contributing modest self-consumption savings but no export arbitrage value.

On TOU-D-5-8PM, the annual bill drops to roughly $2,100. The battery is fully covering the 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. peak window most days, and the weekend off-peak structure protects the household when they are home Saturday and Sunday.

On TOU-D-4-9PM, the annual bill is approximately $1,800. The longer five-hour peak window requires more battery work, but the slightly lower peak rate and stronger export pricing during those hours more than compensate.

On TOU-D-PRIME, the annual bill drops to approximately $1,400. The baseline credit is worth roughly $300 per year, the weekend mid-peak pricing is worth another $100, and the export arbitrage during weekday peak hours stays strong.

The annual difference between Schedule D and TOU-D-PRIME on this home is $1,800 per year, which over the 25-year life of the system is $45,000 of additional savings. That is the size of the lever you are pulling when you pick a rate plan.

The numbers shift if you change the inputs. A larger battery, say 27 kilowatt-hours instead of 13.5, widens the TOU-D-PRIME advantage further because you can cover more peak hours and export more during the highest-value window. A smaller battery, say 10 kilowatt-hours, narrows the gap because you cannot fully cover the five-hour peak window. A larger solar array shifts the export side of the equation, which favors TOU-D-PRIME and TOU-D-4-9PM over TOU-D-5-8PM because more energy is moving through the longer peak window.

Household behavior also matters. A retired couple home all day uses peak power differently than a working family with school-age kids. A household that runs the air conditioning aggressively during summer afternoons pulls more peak energy than one that pre-cools the house at 3 p.m. and rides through the evening with fans. Two homes with identical solar and battery hardware can land on different optimal plans because of how the family actually lives.

The Difference Between Rate Schedules and Tariffs

One source of confusion when reading SCE documentation is the distinction between a rate schedule and a tariff. The schedule is the pricing structure itself, like TOU-D- PRIME or TOU-D-4-9PM. The tariff is the full legal document that describes how the schedule is administered, including eligibility, billing rules, baseline calculations, credit policies, and dispute procedures.

When you switch rate plans, you are agreeing to the full tariff, not just the headline pricing. The tariff is where you find the rules about bill protection, the 12-month lock-in, the one-free-switch-per-year policy, and the fine print on how SCE handles edge cases like net surplus generation.

The full tariff documents are publicly posted on the SCE website. For most homeowners, the high-level summaries are sufficient, but if you are running a larger solar plus battery system or planning to export aggressively, the underlying tariff language is worth a careful read.

Schedules and tariffs both update on a published cadence. SCE refreshes its export credit hourly values multiple times per year through the Avoided Cost Calculator, and the underlying rate schedules update at least annually as part of the General Rate Case process. None of this changes your plan choice automatically, but it does mean that the math you ran in 2024 may not hold in 2026. An annual rate plan review is the right cadence for most homes.

Common Mistakes Solar Owners Make on SCE Rate Plans

The first common mistake is leaving your panels on the rate plan SCE assigned by default when your system was energized. SCE picks a starting plan based on rough household assumptions, and that plan is often not the one that fits your real usage profile six months later. Always audit after the first year.

The second common mistake is forgetting that a battery is required to take advantage of the highest-value rate plans. If you installed solar without storage and you are sitting on TOU-D-4-9PM, the math may look painful because you are paying peak prices for evening usage your panels cannot offset. Adding a battery and switching to TOU-D- PRIME is often the right move, but you have to run the numbers to see whether the battery payback works on your specific bill.

The third common mistake is misprogramming the battery. Default battery settings usually run in self-consumption mode, which prioritizes covering your own load over exporting to the grid. Self-consumption is the right mode under NEM 2.0, but under NEM 3.0 it leaves money on the table during peak export hours. Switching to time- based control mode and tuning the discharge schedule to match your rate plan can be worth several hundred dollars per year.

The fourth common mistake is signing up for a rate plan based on a friend's advice rather than your own usage data. Two homes a block apart in Temecula can have wildly different optimal plans based on family schedule, HVAC efficiency, pool equipment, and EV usage. Always run the analysis on your own meter data.

How Temecula Climate Affects Rate Plan Math

Southwest Riverside County sits in SCE climate zone 10, which is one of the hotter inland zones in the SCE service area. Summer afternoons routinely exceed 100 degrees from late June through early September, and the cooling load on a typical Temecula home is substantially higher than on a coastal home in the same square footage.

This matters for rate plan math in two ways. First, your peak-hour usage is heavier than average because air conditioners are running hardest exactly during the 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. window. That makes the battery work harder, which in turn raises the value of plans with longer peak windows where you have more hours to spread the dispatch. Second, your baseline allocation under TOU-D-PRIME is more generous than coastal zones, which makes the baseline credit worth more in absolute dollars.

Winter electric usage in Temecula is significantly lower than summer for most homes because the heating load is modest. This creates a seasonal mismatch where your solar production is moderate in winter, your usage is moderate in winter, and the rate plan differences are minor. The summer months are where the rate plan choice swings your bill the most, which is also when you are most exposed to peak rate increases.

Homes in the higher elevations around Anza, Aguanga, and parts of Wildomar that fall outside climate zone 10 should verify their zone before applying any of this math. The baseline allocations and seasonal pricing curves shift meaningfully across zone boundaries.

What Solar Installers Often Get Wrong About Rate Plans

Many solar sales teams treat the rate plan question as an afterthought during the design conversation. They focus on system size, panel brand, battery capacity, and financing, then mention in passing that you will be switched to a TOU plan when the system is energized. The specific plan choice and the dispatch programming details are often left for the customer to figure out later, or are set on default values during commissioning without much thought.

This approach was acceptable under NEM 2.0 because the rate plan choice mattered less. Under NEM 3.0, it is one of the most important conversations to have before installation, not after. The system you design should be sized and configured with a specific rate plan in mind, because the optimal solar to battery ratio shifts depending on which plan you intend to sit on.

A second pattern to watch for is installers who oversell battery capacity. The math on TOU-D-PRIME does not require a massive battery. A 13.5 kilowatt-hour battery covers most homes well, and a second battery only makes sense if your evening usage is heavy or if you want significant backup capacity. Some sales teams push 27 or 40 kilowatt-hours of storage because the commission is bigger, but the marginal return per kilowatt-hour of added battery falls off quickly.

A third pattern is installers who recommend self-consumption mode by default and never touch it again. As noted earlier, this leaves money on the table under NEM 3.0. If your installer commissioned your battery in self-consumption mode without walking you through the time-based control alternative, ask why. The answer should be specific to your usage pattern, not a vague preference.

Frequently Asked Questions

Get Your Free Rate Plan Audit

If you have solar on your roof in Temecula, Murrieta, Menifee, Lake Elsinore, or Wildomar, the right SCE rate plan can save you $300 to $1,800 per year compared to sitting on the default. The audit takes us about 30 minutes, costs you nothing, and uses your actual 12 months of usage data rather than guesses.

We will tell you which plan fits your home, walk you through the switch in the SCE portal, and help you tune your battery dispatch settings to match the new plan. If you are also considering adding a battery to an existing solar system, we can run the payback math at the same time.

Our service area covers all of southwest Riverside County, including Temecula, Murrieta, Menifee, Wildomar, Lake Elsinore, Canyon Lake, Sun City, Winchester, French Valley, and the higher elevation communities of Anza and Aguanga. Every home has different solar production, different evening usage patterns, and a different optimal rate plan. The audit gets you a clean answer based on your specific meter data.