Going Solar in Orange County? Why SCE Rates Change the Math

Almost everything written about solar savings in this region is written for an SDG&E customer. If Southern California Edison bills you, the numbers move — here is how, and what it means for system and battery sizing.

If you live in Orange County and you have been reading up on solar, there is a good chance most of what you found was calculated for somebody else’s utility. San Diego content assumes SDG&E. Orange County, with a handful of exceptions, is Southern California Edison territory — a different rate card, a different peak structure, and a different set of incentives.

The core case for solar holds in both places. But the arithmetic that decides how big a system you buy, whether a battery pays, and how much you actually save is genuinely different. Here is what changes.

First, confirm which utility you are actually on

This sounds obvious and it catches people out, because the boundary does not follow city lines cleanly.

SDG&E serves a slice of southern Orange County — San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Dana Point, Laguna Niguel and Mission Viejo, along with unincorporated areas. Everything north and west of that is SCE, with one further exception: the City of Anaheim runs its own municipal utility, Anaheim Public Utilities, and is neither.

The complication is that the SDG&E/SCE line runs through several cities rather than around them. Parts of Mission Viejo, Laguna Niguel and the unincorporated communities of south county are split. So do not go by your city name — look at your actual bill. Whichever logo is on it is the rate structure your solar system has to be designed against.

The headline difference: SCE rates are lower

This is the single biggest factor, and it cuts against Orange County.

As of June 2026, the average SDG&E residential rate was 45.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. The SCE average was 34.4 cents. SDG&E is running roughly 32% higher.

That matters because solar savings are fundamentally a function of what you are avoiding paying. Every kilowatt-hour your array offsets is worth about a third more in San Diego than it is in Irvine. It does not make solar a bad investment in SCE territory — 34.4 cents is still well above the national average, and utility rates in the region have climbed for years — but it does mean a payback period modelled on SDG&E numbers will be optimistic if you are an Edison customer.

The peak windows look similar and behave differently

Both utilities put their most expensive hours in the late afternoon and evening. That is where the similarity ends.

SDG&E’s 4–9 p.m. peak applies every day — weekdays, weekends and holidays alike. On the TOU-DR1 plan, summer on-peak energy runs about 69 cents per kWh against 46 cents off-peak.

SCE discounts the weekend. On TOU-D-4-9PM, the summer weekday peak is around 58 cents, but the same 4–9 p.m. window on a Saturday or Sunday drops to roughly 46 cents. Off-peak sits near 34 cents.

That weekend discount has a real consequence for storage. A battery earns its keep by charging on cheap power and discharging into expensive hours. In SDG&E territory there are seven expensive evenings a week to arbitrage against. In SCE territory there are five at full value and two at a discount. The battery still pays — but it pays on fewer days, which stretches the payback.

There is a second wrinkle worth knowing. SDG&E expanded its Super Off-Peak window to 10 a.m.–2 p.m. on weekdays, year-round, on top of the overnight period. That is a genuinely cheap midday block that solar and EV owners can exploit. SCE’s super off-peak, by contrast, exists only in the winter months on the 4-9PM and 5-8PM plans; there is no summer super-off-peak period on those schedules at all.

If you go solar with SCE, your rate plan is chosen for you

Both utilities now put new solar customers on the Net Billing Tariff — the framework most people call NEM 3.0 — which the California Public Utilities Commission applied to all three big investor-owned utilities for interconnection applications from April 2023 onward. Under it, exported power is credited at its hourly avoided cost to the grid rather than at retail, which is why self-consumption matters so much more than it used to.

What differs is the rate plan you land on. SCE net-billing customers are required to take the PRIME option of Schedule TOU-D, with no ability to opt out to a non-time-differentiated rate. SDG&E puts Solar Billing Plan customers on EV-TOU-5.

TOU-D-PRIME is a reasonable plan to be put on — its summer off-peak rate is around 26 cents, meaningfully below the other SCE residential schedules — but it is a decision made for you, and any proposal you receive should be modelling your bill on PRIME rather than on whatever plan you are currently on.

One place SCE customers come out ahead

There is a compensating factor, and most Orange County homeowners have never heard of it.

Residential customers of SCE and PG&E receive an ACC Plus adder — an additional export credit on top of the standard avoided-cost rate, locked in for nine years from interconnection. SDG&E residential customers are explicitly excluded from it; the CPUC’s stated reason is SDG&E’s higher baseline rates.

For a 2026 interconnection vintage, the SCE adder is roughly 2.4 cents per kWh for standard residential customers, and about 5.6 cents for customers who qualify on equity grounds. It steps down each year — earlier vintages received more — and it applies only to exported energy, not to what you self-consume.

It does not close the 11-cent gap in retail rates. But it is real money on every kilowatt-hour you send to the grid, it rewards interconnecting sooner rather than later, and a proposal that ignores it is understating your return. The exact eligibility window has been stated inconsistently across SCE’s own tariff documents, so ask your installer to confirm the current terms rather than relying on a number from a blog post — including this one.

What this means for how your system should be designed

Pulling it together, an Orange County system on SCE should be designed differently from an otherwise identical San Diego one:

• Size to self-consumption, not to export. True in both territories under net billing, but the lower SCE retail rate makes oversizing for export credits even harder to justify.
• Expect the battery case to be built on five strong evenings, not seven. The weekend discount is not a reason to skip storage — it is a reason to model it honestly.
• Make sure the model uses TOU-D-PRIME, since that is where you will end up.
• Ask whether ACC Plus is in the numbers. If your installer has not mentioned it, they are either being conservative or they have not accounted for it.
• Do not carry over a San Diego payback figure. At 34.4 cents versus 45.5, the same array in the same sun produces a materially different return.

Two things that changed for everyone

Whichever utility bills you, two 2025–26 changes apply equally and reset any older payback model you may have read.

The federal residential solar tax credit under Section 25D ended on December 31, 2025. A homeowner buying a system with cash in 2026 does not receive 30% back. A great deal of solar content still says the credit runs “through 2032” — that was the pre-2025 law, and repeating it will give you a payback estimate that is wrong by tens of thousands of dollars. The IRS guidance on the residential credit is the authority here, and your CPA is the right person to ask about your specific situation.

Both utilities have also introduced a fixed Base Services Charge of roughly $24 a month. Solar cannot offset it. It is a modest number, but it is a floor under your bill that did not used to be there, and it should appear in any honest model.

Get the numbers run for your meter, not your region

The difference between an SCE and an SDG&E solar proposal is not cosmetic. Different rates, different peak days, different mandatory rate plan, different export adder — and if the boundary runs through your neighbourhood, your neighbour may genuinely be on the other one.

A proper evaluation starts by pulling your actual usage data and your actual rate schedule, then modelling the array and the battery against those. Anything else is a regional average dressed up as a quote.

If you want to see what solar actually looks like on an SCE bill rather than on a San Diego average, Stellar Solar is a strong local choice to start with. We have designed and installed solar across Southern California since 1998, Orange County included, and our credibility is backed by third-party signals homeowners recognize, including an A+ BBB rating and being a consistent winner of San Diego’s Best Solar in the Union-Tribune Readers Poll. Call 866.787.6527 for a free evaluation, or get your free quote here.

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Can Solar Offset Your Pool Costs in San Diego?

Powering Your Pump & Heater with Solar

What a pool actually costs to run

Two things drive pool electricity use:

• The pump. A pool pump runs for hours every day to circulate and filter water. Older single-speed pumps are especially hungry — often one of the largest single loads in the whole house. A variable-speed pump is far more efficient but is still a daily, recurring draw.
• The heater. An electric heat-pump pool heater typically draws around 5–6 kWh per hour and can use 15–25 kWh on a day you’re heating — roughly $50 to $150+ a month in the swim season, and more if you like the water warm. As a rule of thumb, every degree warmer you keep the pool adds roughly 10% to heating cost.

Add the pump and heater together and a heated San Diego pool can rival — or beat — air conditioning as your top summer electricity expense. Many pool owners are surprised to learn that the “mystery” behind their high bill isn’t the house at all; it’s the equipment in the side yard.

Why solar is a natural fit for pool loads

Here’s what makes pools such a good match for solar: most pool electricity is used during the day. Pumps are typically scheduled to run in daylight hours, and heat-pump heaters work most efficiently when the air is warm — again, daytime. That’s precisely when your panels are producing.

So instead of buying grid power to run the pump and heater, you can run them straight off your roof. Because it’s a daytime load, a pool is one of the easiest things to cover with solar — you don’t even need a battery to offset it, since the pump, the heater, and the sun are all “on” at the same time. That’s a genuinely favorable overlap: the appliance you’re trying to power and the free energy source are naturally in sync.

Timing the pump to your solar

One of the simplest, highest-impact moves is scheduling. If you shift your pump (and heating) to run during the middle of the day — say the 10 a.m.–2 p.m. window, which is also SDG&E’s cheap super off-peak period in 2026 — you accomplish two things at once:

1. You run it on your own solar production, using power you’re generating for free rather than buying it.
2. Any grid power you do draw is billed at the lowest rate of the day (~38¢ super off-peak) instead of the ~70¢ 4–9 p.m. peak.

The one thing you want to avoid is running the pump or heater during that 4–9 p.m. peak. A variable-speed pump on a smart daytime schedule, paired with solar, is a genuinely powerful combination for a pool owner — often the difference between a pool that’s a budget headache and one that barely registers on the bill.

How much can solar offset?

For a home with a pool, adding the pool’s daytime load into the system design usually means a somewhat larger array — but because the load is daytime and predictable, solar can offset the large majority of it. When we size a system for a pool home, we account for the pump schedule and the heater’s draw so your array is big enough to carry both the house and the pool through summer.

If you also heat the pool deep into the evening or into the cooler shoulder seasons, a battery can extend your own solar into those hours — but for most pool owners, the biggest win is simply generating your own daytime power and running the pool on it.

What affects how much solar you’ll need

• Pump type and runtime. A variable-speed pump on a sensible schedule needs far fewer panels to offset than an old single-speed unit running long hours.
• Whether you heat, and how warm. An unheated pool is basically just the pump. A pool kept at 85° for much of the year is a much bigger load — and a bigger solar opportunity.
• Swim season length. San Diego’s long season is a double-edged sword: more months of enjoyment, but more months of pump and heater runtime to plan for.

The solar pool-heating option

Worth a mention: beyond powering an electric heater with PV, some homeowners also look at dedicated solar thermal pool heating — roof or ground collectors that warm the water directly using the sun’s heat rather than making electricity. It’s a different technology from the electricity-generating panels this post is about, and which approach makes sense depends on your setup, your roof, and how you use the pool. It’s a good thing to raise when you plan a system so you can compare the options side by side.

A few quick questions

Do I need a battery to offset my pool? Usually not. Because the pump and heater run during daylight, panels can cover them directly. A battery helps if you heat into the evening, but it isn’t required for daytime pool loads.

Will adding a pool load make my system huge? It makes it somewhat larger, but pools are efficient to offset precisely because the load is daytime and predictable — exactly when solar is producing.

What’s the single biggest money-saver? Scheduling. Moving the pump to midday, on solar and off the peak, is free to do and immediately effective.

The bottom line

A pool doesn’t have to be the reason your summer bill hurts. Because the pump and heater run during the day, solar can offset most of your pool’s electricity — and scheduling those loads to midday makes the match even tighter. The key is designing the system with the pool load in mind from the start, rather than treating it as an afterthought.

Want to see how much of your pool’s running costs solar could cover? Stellar Solar has been San Diego’s trusted solar installer since 1998 — A+ rated with the BBB and a repeat winner of San Diego’s Best Solar in the Union-Tribune Readers Poll. Get a free estimate that factors in your pool at your free quote here or call 866.787.6527.

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