PG&E Solar Battery Rebates and Incentives in 2026

Start with three facts about your household

Before you compare programs, write down three things. First, how many Wildfire Safety outages your account has had since January 1, 2024. PG&E's outage rebate turns on that number. Second, whether you are enrolled in CARE, FERA or the Energy Savings Assistance program, or earn 80 percent of area median income or less. SGIP's equity money is reserved for income-qualified homes. Third, who delivers your electricity. Most PG&E gas and electric customers get power from PG&E, but some homes in PG&E's gas territory get electricity from a public utility such as SMUD, and SGIP tracks those customers in a separate budget.

With those three answers, most of the programs below either clearly apply to you or clearly don't.

If your account has had repeated wildfire outages

PG&E's Permanent Battery Storage Rebate pays $7,500 once per household after a qualifying permanent battery is installed and receives Permission to Operate. You need five or more Wildfire Safety outages since January 1, 2024, a time-of-use rate, a battery from PG&E's Qualified Product List bought on or after January 1, 2025, and enrollment in the Emergency Load Reduction Program through your battery provider. PG&E's page showed 179 rebates remaining as of September 18, 2026, when we checked on September 24, 2026, and applications close December 31, 2026 at the latest.

If you also receive CARE, FERA, Medical Baseline or are enrolled as Self-Identified Vulnerable, and your circuit is one of PG&E's EPSS circuits, the Residential Storage Initiative installs a battery at no charge. PG&E says it reaches eligible customers by letter or email.

The two can't be combined. The rebate's terms exclude anyone who took part in the Residential Storage Initiative, the Reliability Battery Initiative or SGIP. The Reliability Battery Initiative itself says it is full for 2026.

If your household is income-qualified

The Self-Generation Incentive Program is the state's main battery incentive, overseen by the CPUC and run in PG&E's territory by PG&E as program administrator. Its Residential Solar and Storage Equity budget pays $1.10 per watt-hour of storage and $3.10 per watt of solar at the current step, and the CPUC says it is open to low-income residential customers. PG&E's own SGIP page describes eligibility as 80 percent of area median income or less, or participation in CARE, FERA or the Energy Savings Assistance program, and says renters can qualify with the landlord's approval.

Funding is the problem. The CPUC closed the ratepayer-funded SGIP budgets to new applications at the end of 2025 under Decision 25-12-003. The state-funded AB 209 budgets stayed open, with a June 30, 2028 deadline for new applications. On September 23, 2026, the SGIP tracker showed the AB 209 equity budget for PG&E's regular electric customers on a waitlist. A waitlist spot is not a reservation. It turns into money only if funds come back through cancellations.

One change helps: SGIP removed the demand response requirement for Residential Storage Equity and Residential Solar and Storage Equity applications in January 2026, so an equity battery no longer has to join a grid-event program to qualify.

If a public utility, not PG&E, delivers your electricity

SGIP's AB 209 money includes a separate equity budget for customers of publicly owned utilities that PG&E administers. On September 23, 2026, that budget showed Open in PG&E's column, with about $7.7 million available, while the budget for PG&E's own electric customers was waitlisted.

The SGIP program administrators said in September 2026 that single-family equity applications in PG&E's program where the host customer is an electric customer of PG&E or the Sacramento Municipal Utility District no longer need a preliminary monitoring plan. That is a paperwork change, but it confirms SMUD customers are part of PG&E's SGIP program. If your bill says SMUD or another municipal utility, ask your installer to check the publicly owned utility budget specifically, and to show you the tracker entry before quoting a rebate.

Everyone else: pay for grid events, not upfront

If you don't meet the outage or income tests, the realistic incentive is ongoing payment for letting your battery help the grid. PG&E's Automated Response Technology program works through providers that PG&E pays based on how much load their customers reduce during events. PG&E says providers may pass incentives to you at their discretion, that events can happen any time of year, and that no event lasts more than four hours in a day.

The California Energy Commission's Demand Side Grid Support program pays electric customers for load reduction and backup generation during extreme events. The CEC says it runs May through October, and battery owners enroll through a participating provider. Neither program publishes a fixed per-home amount on those pages, so ask the provider for the payment terms in writing and how much battery charge it keeps in reserve for your own backup.

Why a battery earns more on the Solar Billing Plan

Rebates are only half the math. The other half is what your battery saves on the bill, and on PG&E's Solar Billing Plan that depends heavily on the hour.

PG&E credits exports under the Solar Billing Plan at hourly values set through the CPUC's Avoided Cost Calculator. PG&E's 2026 price sheet for customers who applied in 2025 or 2026 shows a weekday export at noon in April earning about $0.0085 per kWh, generation and delivery combined, while a weekday export at 7 p.m. in August earns about $1.15 per kWh. A battery that stores cheap midday solar and uses or exports it in the evening captures that spread. The CPUC says customers can maximize bill savings under net billing by installing storage, and reports that nearly 70 percent of net billing customers had paired a battery with solar by the end of 2024.

Two cautions. Those generation credits apply only if PG&E supplies your generation; a community choice aggregator sets its own generation export pricing. And customers on legacy NEM 2.0 still earn close to retail for exports, so a battery there is mostly a backup purchase.

The early-adopter export bonus runs out in 2027

The CPUC's net billing decision added a bonus to export credits for residential PG&E and SCE customers, stepped down each year. In Decision 22-12-056 the starting adder for PG&E was $0.022 per kWh for non-CARE households and $0.090 per kWh for CARE households, falling 20 percent at the end of each calendar year until it reaches zero. Customers lock in the amount in effect when they enroll for nine years. The CPUC's current page says residential PG&E and SCE customers who apply to interconnect before the end of 2027 receive it.

PG&E calls these Energy Export Bonus Credits and says they apply to customers who adopt solar and start on the Solar Billing Plan before 2028. If you are adding a battery to a new solar system, that deadline is worth more to you than any remaining SGIP step.