Utilities · Southern California

SCE in 2026: a nine-year export lock and a missing price sheet

SLWritten by the Solar Learning Lab research desk·Updated August 18, 2026·7 min read

Southern California Edison serves about 5 million accounts across 430 cities, and its solar program has the single most valuable guarantee in California net billing: export credit prices fixed for nine years if you enroll before 2028. It also has a transparency problem we hit head-on while researching this page. The plan structures are public. The daily charge is public. The actual per-kWh time-of-use prices are buried in PDFs that would not load. We built this guide from what SCE does publish, and we tell you exactly where the holes are.

How the nine-year export lock works

Under the Solar Billing Plan, SCE prices exports from the CPUC Avoided Cost Calculator as of January 1 of your vintage year. Your vintage is set when you enroll, and the vintages NBT23 through NBT26 carry fixed prices for the first nine years. SCE publishes 20 years of prices, but only the lock-in window is guaranteed. Credits split into a delivery component (transmission, distribution, greenhouse gas adder, methane leakage) and a generation component (energy, cap and trade, generation capacity).

The lock is the strategic asset here. Arizona solar shoppers watch their export rate get cut 10 percent a year by commission vote. An SCE customer who enrolled in 2026 knows exactly what each hour of export pays through 2035. That certainty is worth real money when financing a system, and it expires for new enrollments on January 1, 2028. The CPUC adds one sharp edge: customers migrating from an older NEM tariff are not eligible for the legacy period, so upgrading a grandfathered system into the Solar Billing Plan burns the old protection without earning the new one.

Sources: SCE understanding export pricing, SCE Solar Billing Plan, and the CPUC net billing page.

Ten business days to PTO, if the paperwork is clean

SCE's stated service level is the fastest we have documented among the utilities we cover: simple, standard, solar-only interconnection requests with all correct information and documents may receive Permission to Operate within 10 business days. The CPUC lists SCE's interconnection fee at $94 for systems under 1 MW, the cheapest of California's three investor-owned utilities.

The qualifiers do real work in that sentence. Paired storage or non-standard metering pushes the application into deeper engineering review, and a required meter change adds a scheduling step before PTO. SCE recommends submitting the application, single line diagram, signed interconnection agreement, and final electrical permit approval as one package. In practice, the 10-day path belongs to installers who have done this a hundred times. Enrollment in the Solar Billing Plan itself lands within a few billing cycles after approval.

One more geography note: the city of Los Angeles is not SCE territory. It belongs to LADWP, a municipal utility with retail-rate net metering and an entirely different rulebook, which we cover in the LADWP guide. SCE wraps around the city: think Long Beach, Anaheim outskirts, the San Gabriel Valley, and most of the 430 cities in between. The California page covers the statewide incentives both territories share.

Sources: SCE Solar Billing Plan FAQs and the CPUC net billing page.

What we could not verify

As of August 18, 2026: per-kWh prices for TOU-D-4-9PM, TOU-D-5-8PM, and TOU-D-PRIME (both SCE rate PDFs returned errors); the effective date behind the posted 30 and 40 cent tiered prices; current dollar values of the Energy Export Credit by hour and vintage; any pending SCE rate case for test year 2029; and any SCE residential solar or battery rebate. Every number we did print traces to a page we reviewed, linked at the point of use. Corrections run through our editorial policy.