August 10, 2026 · 7 min read · Daylight Solar
If a salesperson at your door is quoting solar like it's 2021, they're either behind or hoping you are. In April 2023, California replaced net metering as most people knew it (NEM 2.0) with the Net Billing Tariff — everyone calls it NEM 3.0 — and it changed the math for every new SCE solar customer in the Inland Empire. It didn't kill solar. It changed which systems make sense. Here's the whole thing in plain English.
The old deal vs. the new deal
Under the old rules, every kilowatt-hour your panels exported to the grid earned you roughly what you'd have paid to buy it — a clean one-for-one trade. Your meter literally ran backwards at retail value.
Under NEM 3.0, exports are credited at the grid's 'avoided cost' — and for most hours of the year that's on the order of a few cents per kilowatt-hour, while the power you buy back in the evening costs you 30 cents or more. Sell low at noon, buy high at 6pm. That asymmetry is the entire story of modern California solar design.
Why this makes batteries the main character
A battery closes the gap. Instead of exporting your midday production for pennies, you store it and spend it yourself during SCE's 4–9pm peak window — when rates on time-of-use plans run highest, and when an Inland Empire house is running its AC hardest anyway.
That's why solar-with-storage paybacks in Southern California now generally beat solar-only paybacks, commonly landing in the 6–9 year range versus roughly 10–14 for solar alone (2026 figures; your bill, roof, and rate plan move these numbers). It's also why any quote that doesn't at least model a battery for an SCE home isn't really a 2026 quote.
Who NEM 3.0 does NOT apply to
Two groups of readers can relax a little. First: if your system was interconnected under NEM 1.0 or 2.0, you're grandfathered on your old tariff for years to come — one more reason not to let a re-sales pitch talk you into 'upgrading' your agreement casually.
Second: homes billed by municipal utilities instead of SCE. The City of Riverside's RPU runs its own net-metering program with its own rules, and so do Colton and Banning's city utilities. The CPUC's NEM 3.0 decision covers investor-owned utilities like SCE — not the munis. If you're inside Riverside city limits, your math is genuinely different, and usually better.
The one-sentence takeaway
Solar still works in the Inland Empire in 2026 — but it works as a design problem, not a commodity purchase. Size the system to your real usage, aim production at your own evening consumption (usually with storage), verify which utility actually bills you, and demand the whole math in writing before you sign. Anyone who skips those steps is selling you their payment plan, not your savings.