Do I Still Get a Utility Bill With Solar? Yes — Here's What's On It

Why you didn't get the near-$0 bill you may have expected

If you talked to a solar company before 2023, or you heard about solar from a neighbor whose system predates that, the mental model you got was probably NEM 2.0: export credits offset imports one-for-one in dollar terms, and most months landed near zero. That system still exists for people grandfathered into it, but new applicants have not been eligible since the Net Billing Tariff took over.

The replacement tariff was adopted deliberately, after a multi-year rulemaking (R.20-08-020), specifically to end the near-zero-bill outcome for new solar customers. The Commission's decision requires monthly payment of all incurred charges — not a rolling balance that only gets settled once a year (D.22-12-056 at 136). If your installer told you "you won't get bills anymore," that statement was accurate for systems installed years ago and is not accurate for a system installed today. That gap between what was pitched and what the tariff now requires is the single most common source of the "wait, why am I still getting billed" moment — and it's a communication failure on the sales side, not a sign the solar itself is malfunctioning.

Worth noting: this isn't unique to any one installer or company. It's the tariff every customer under PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E who interconnected after the NEM 2.0 cutover is subject to, regardless of who sold or installed the system.

Two different clocks: the monthly bill and the annual true-up

These run on separate schedules and settle different things, and treating them as one event is where the confusion compounds.

Monthly billing nets that month's grid exports against that month's grid imports, applies any bill credits you've banked from prior months, and charges you for whatever's left. If you have leftover credit after a light-usage month, it doesn't get paid out — it rolls forward to next month's bill (D.22-12-056 at 134-136).

Annual true-up is a full reconciliation, once every 12 months, on the anniversary of your system's interconnection date — not January 1, not your billing cycle start. If you owe more than your banked credits cover across the full year, you pay the difference. If you exported more than you used across the full year, you get paid a small per-kWh amount called Net Surplus Compensation — "a few cents per excess kilowatt-hour," per the Commission's own description (D.22-12-056, Appendix A, p. A-2). That rate is set and tracked separately from the routine hourly export-credit rate applied to your regular monthly bill, and is typically the smaller of the two.

One practical option buried in the decision: you can request a one-time change to your true-up anniversary date, specifically so summer-banked credits can be applied against winter bills instead of expiring against an arbitrary date (D.22-12-056 at 136, Ordering Para. 1(h)). SDG&E specifically was ordered to develop a standard process for handling these requests, with a 120-day compliance deadline from the decision's adoption (D.22-12-056 at 240, Ordering Para. 3). Ask your utility directly for the current procedure — whether the timing of your true-up date is working against you is worth a direct call either way.

Why the bill amount swings so much month to month

A $14 May bill and a $210 December bill from the same household, same system, isn't a red flag — it's what the tariff and California's solar seasonality produce together.

California solar systems typically produce two to three times more electricity in summer than in winter, a point the Commission's decision cites directly in explaining why it rejected utility proposals for a monthly (rather than annual) true-up: annual reconciliation "allow[s] for the natural cycle of solar conditions" (D.22-12-056 at 135-136). In practice: spring and summer months bank large surplus credits from afternoon exports. Fall and winter draw those credits down, and once they're exhausted you're paying cash, at that month's time-of-use rate, for whatever you import.

There's a second reason the swing isn't a clean wash even in a break-even year: exports and imports are valued differently depending on the hour. A kWh you export at 1pm is worth a different bill credit than a kWh you import at 7pm, because time-of-use export and import rates aren't set to mirror each other (CALSSA's point, adopted by the Commission at 135). So even a system that produces exactly what the household consumes over a year can still generate real net charges in individual months, purely from the timing mismatch between when you're exporting and when you're drawing power back.

The four charges solar cannot zero out

This is the part of the bill worth understanding before you're surprised by it: certain charges apply to every kilowatt-hour you import from the grid and cannot be offset by exported-energy bill credits, no matter how large your system is or how much you've banked.

The Commission's decision confirms four specific non-bypassable charges: the Public Purpose Programs Charge, the Nuclear Decommissioning Charge, the Competition Transition Charge, and the Wildfire Fund Non-Bypassable Charge (D.22-12-056 at 115-119, formally adopted at Ordering Para. 1(f), p. 239). That last one replaced an older DWR Bond Charge that expired in 2020.

These exist because they fund obligations the state has decided every customer shares in — low-income rate assistance and energy efficiency programs, retired nuclear plant decommissioning, stranded generation costs from utility restructuring, and wildfire fund contributions — regardless of whether that customer happens to have solar. A system that exports more than it imports over a year will still see these line items on months where it drew any power from the grid at all, even a small amount overnight.

This is normal and it is not a billing error. If your installer implied a fully solar-powered home would see literal $0 bills forever, that implied a level of self-sufficiency (24/7, zero grid draw, including at night) that grid-tied solar without a large battery doesn't achieve — and even then, these four charges attach to any imported kWh.

Connection fees, minimum bills, and other fixed charges

Beyond the four non-bypassable charges, most residential rate schedules carry their own fixed or minimum-bill structure that solar doesn't remove.

The Commission's decision is explicit that it did not invent a new minimum bill for Net Billing customers — it simply confirmed that, as was the current practice in NEM 2.0, "net billing tariff customers will be subject to any minimum bill or fixed charge that is contained in a customer's applicable rate" (D.22-12-056 at 128; adopted at Ordering Para. 1(g), p. 239). In other words: whatever minimum applies to the underlying rate schedule you're on (PG&E's E-ELEC, SCE's TOU-D-PRIME, SDG&E's EV-TOU-5, and similar plans) still applies after solar. For reference, a prior Commission decision, D.15-07-001, set a minimum bill of $5/month for CARE customers and $10/month for non-CARE residential customers on the non-generation portion of the bill (cited at D.22-12-056, p. 128 and Finding of Fact 136, p. 227) — that figure comes from the NEM 2.0 era, and whether the exact dollar amount carries forward unchanged on today's rate schedules wasn't independently confirmed for this page. Check your utility's current tariff sheet for the number that applies to your account.

Separately, there's a one-time application fee to interconnect in the first place — not a recurring bill item, but worth knowing about upfront. SCE publishes a $94 fee for systems under 1 MW (residential systems are almost always well under this) and $800 for systems 1 MW and larger (sce.com, fetched 2026-09-08). That's paid once, at installation, not monthly.

What a normal post-solar bill should actually contain

A legitimate monthly bill after solar installation will typically show, in some form: a basic service or meter charge, generation charges for any energy purchased from the utility, distribution and transmission delivery charges, the four non-bypassable charges above, a scattering of small regulatory line items (a CEC energy fee, a franchise fee), your net energy credit or charge for the billing period, and your running bank of banked bill credits carried from prior months. PG&E's own bill explainer groups these into three buckets — Energy Cost (about 50% of a typical electric bill), Energy Delivery (about 40%), and Public Purpose Programs (about 10%) — with named line items including the Base Services Charge, Distribution Charge, Wildfire Hardening Charge, Recovery Bond Charge/Credit, the Power Charge Indifference Adjustment (PCIA), and Competition Transition Charges (pge.com, fetched 2026-09-08). SCE and SDG&E structure their bills similarly, though this page could not independently pull an equivalent itemized list directly from either utility's own bill-explainer page — treat the Commission's decision (Table 5, p. 118) as the authoritative cross-check for what's allowed to appear.

What should NOT be a permanent fixture: a bill that never shows any credit line, ever, even in July. If your system is sized and oriented reasonably and you're seeing full retail-equivalent charges in your peak production month with zero bill credit applied, that's worth a call to your utility to check the interconnection was completed and net metering is actually active on the account — not a normal outcome of the tariff itself.

Why your neighbor's bill looks completely different

If a neighbor with solar has a visibly different-looking bill than yours — different credit structure, different rate schedule name, no true-up mentioned at all — the likely explanation is that they're on a different tariff generation, not that either bill is wrong.

Customers who interconnected under an earlier NEM tariff (1.0 or 2.0) keep those original terms for 20 years from their interconnection date — a legacy period the Commission originally set in D.16-01-044 and left unchanged for standard NEM 1.0/2.0 customers in this decision (D.22-12-056, Finding of Fact 235, p. 229). That's a different figure from the nine-year period mentioned elsewhere on this page: nine years is how long the Net Billing Tariff locks in its own terms for a new NEM 3.0 customer once they interconnect, tied to the original customer rather than the system, with a narrow exception for a surviving spouse or domestic partner (D.22-12-056, Ordering Para. 1(i), pp. 239-240). Two different tariff generations, two different clocks — don't let one get mistaken for the other.

There's a related wrinkle for anyone interconnecting soon: PG&E and SCE customers (not SDG&E, whose already-higher rates make the adder unnecessary) who interconnect before the end of 2027 get a temporary bump to their export credit rate for nine years, called the ACC Plus adder (D.22-12-056, Appendix A; Ordering Para. 1(b), pp. 237-238). Two neighbors who both installed under Net Billing, six months apart, can still see different effective export rates because of this one provision alone. None of this means one household's deal was better negotiated — it usually just reflects the interconnection date and the tariff version active on that date.

When this concern doesn't actually apply to you

Skip the worry if any of the following is true. You're on a publicly owned utility — LADWP, SMUD, MID, Anaheim, Roseville, Lodi, Imperial Irrigation District, or Turlock Irrigation District — none of which are bound by CPUC Net Billing rules; they set their own net metering terms, and some still offer arrangements closer to the old near-zero-bill model. You interconnected under NEM 1.0 or 2.0 before the Net Billing cutover; you're still inside your 20-year grandfathered term (D.16-01-044) and this tariff doesn't govern your account yet. Your bill shows a real, non-zero credit line in your peak production months and only turns to cash charges in fall and winter — that's the seasonal pattern working exactly as designed, not a sign your system is undersized. And if what actually alarmed you was the phrase "you'll still get a bill" itself — that's simply accurate for Net Billing, confirmed by the Commission's own order, and not evidence anyone misled you about how the tariff works, even if a salesperson oversold the near-$0 outcome that only applies to older tariffs.