SDG&E in 2026: the most expensive power in the country

The highest large-utility price in the country, and it is not close

We downloaded the EIA-861 workbook and read the SDG&E row ourselves rather than trusting a summary. For 2024 the company reported 307,982 bundled residential customers, 1,347,817 MWh sold, and $588 million of residential revenue, which divides out to 43.63 cents per kWh. Sort the file by price and filter to utilities with at least 100,000 residential customers, and SDG&E sits at number one out of 194. Widen the filter to all 1,519 reporting entities and it still ranks seventh, behind nothing but small systems.

Source: EIA table 6, 2024 utility bundled retail sales, residential, read cell by cell and recomputed in this session.

One scope caveat that matters more in San Diego than almost anywhere: this file counts bundled customers only. Households whose generation is bought by a community choice aggregator show up in SDG&E's delivery-service revenue instead, $2.53 billion across all classes in 2024, and the 307,982 figure therefore undercounts the meters SDG&E reads. The price it produces is still the cleanest apples-to-apples comparison available, because every utility in the file is measured the same way.

For context on the rest of the bill stack: bundled commercial power averaged 35.54 cents, industrial 26.25 cents, and the all-class bundled average 37.01 cents per kWh. There is no customer class in this territory getting cheap electricity.

Sources: EIA table 7, table 9, table 10, and table 17. Territory figures from SDG&E about us.

What the Solar Billing Plan actually pays for exports

Anyone who applied to interconnect on or after April 15, 2023 takes service under the Net Billing Tariff created by D.22-12-056, which the utilities market as the Solar Billing Plan. Generation serves your own load first. Whatever leaves the property is credited at a value-to-grid price built from the CPUC Avoided Cost Calculator, which is usually below retail but can exceed it on late summer evenings. Surplus left at true-up is cashed out at the wholesale energy price. Non-bypassable charges are calculated on every kWh you import, and export credits cannot be applied to them.

The credit itself arrives in two pieces on your bill, Generation Export Credits and Delivery Export Credits, and both vary by hour and season. The construction is more elaborate than most people assume. For each climate zone SDG&E builds 8,760 hourly avoided costs from the applicable Avoided Cost Calculator vintage, using the delivery component for all customers and the generation component for bundled customers only, straight-averages across climate zones hour by hour, shifts labels for daylight saving time, splits weekdays from weekends and eight named holidays, then averages by month and hour. Add the two components and you have the Energy Export Credit.

What we will not do is print an export price per kWh. SDG&E publishes the actual values only inside ZIP archives of several megabytes each on its export pricing page, five of them by vintage, and we did not open them, so no per-kWh export figure appears anywhere on this page. Ask your installer which vintage file they modeled and what hourly values they pulled. If the answer is a single blended number, they guessed.

Two more mechanics matter. Monthly credits in excess of your charges roll forward to later months until used or until you close the account, per SDG&E, while the CPUC describes rollover running twelve months to an annual true-up. The SDG&E Solar Billing Plan page we read describes only the month-to-month rollover, so treat true-up timing as something to confirm with the utility. And SDG&E customers are explicitly excluded from the nine-year export credit adder that PG&E and SCE customers get for applying before the end of 2027, on the CPUC's reasoning that San Diego's rates already deliver more bill savings.

Sources: CPUC net energy metering and net billing, SDG&E Solar Billing Plan, and SDG&E export pricing.

The climate credit moved, and solar households should notice

California hands cap-and-trade proceeds back to residential customers as the Climate Credit. For 2026 SDG&E electric customers get $49.36 in August and another $49.36 in September, a change from the old spring and autumn timing because the CPUC now directs the residential electric credit into high-billed months under an affordability mandate. Gas customers received $32.58 on the April 2026 bill. Eligible electric-only small business customers keep the April and October schedule at $49.36 each.

Sources: CPUC California Climate Credit and SDG&E climate credit.

Why a solar owner should care: the per-event credit has climbed hard, from $17 in 2016 to $78 in 2024 and $81 in 2025, and now lands in the two months when a well-sized array is already producing its annual peak. Two months of near-zero energy charges plus a $49 credit can push a bill into credit territory, which then rolls forward. That is a timing artifact, not extra savings, and it should not be modeled as recurring monthly value.

How all of this changes the way you size a system

Put the pieces together and San Diego rewards a different design than a low-rate market does. Every kWh you consume behind the meter is worth the retail price you avoid, which on EV-TOU-5 in summer runs from about 13 cents overnight to about 80 cents during the 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. peak. Every kWh you export is worth an avoided-cost credit that is usually well below retail. So the question is not how big an array can I fit. It is how much of my own production can I actually use, and when.

Three practical consequences:

• A battery is doing real work here, not decorating the proposal. The gap between a 13 cent super off-peak hour and an 80 cent peak hour is the largest arbitrage spread on any residential tariff we cover, and the peak window sits after solar noon. Storage that shifts midday production into the evening is capturing retail value instead of avoided-cost value.
• Oversizing purely for export is weak in SDG&E territory in a way it is not for PG&E and SCE customers, who at least have the nine-year export adder through 2027. San Diego was written out of that adder. Extra panels aimed at the grid earn hourly avoided-cost prices that we cannot even quote from a public page, which is itself a reason for caution.
• The $24.15 Base Services Charge sets a floor under every bill and defines the point where extra capacity stops paying. Around $290 a year is untouchable, and export credits are barred from offsetting both it and the non-bypassable public purpose charges on your imports.

On the upper limit, an earlier read of the CPUC net billing material recorded a sizing allowance of annual load plus up to 50 percent with an attestation. We carried that forward rather than re-extracting it in this session, so treat it as a starting point to confirm with your installer and the CPUC page, not as a number to design against.

One last piece of judgment. High rates make San Diego solar look good on almost any spreadsheet, which is precisely why proposals here need harder scrutiny than they get. Check that the model uses the August 1, 2026 EV-TOU-5 sheet and not an old TOU-DR1 assumption. Check that it prices exports at avoided cost rather than at the retail rate. Check that the Base Services Charge appears as a permanent line. Then look at your own city pages for local context, whether that is San Diego, Chula Vista, Oceanside or Escondido. The neighboring investor-owned utilities work differently, and our SCE guide and PG&E guide cover those rules.

What we could not verify

As of August 23, 2026: export credit prices in cents per kWh by month and hour, which SDG&E publishes only inside ZIP archives we did not open; any bundled residential average for the tariffs effective April 1, June 1 or August 1, 2026, since no rate alert has been posted after January 2026; the count of SDG&E residential customers including delivery-only CCA households, because the federal bundled tables exclude them and the delivery-service table reports revenue only; an authoritative list of the south Orange County cities inside the territory, where we could confirm only that CPUC project documents place San Juan Capistrano and San Clemente in it; whether any CCA serves customers on the Orange County side; and whether the $16 basic monthly service fee language still on SDG&E's Solar Billing Plan page is superseded by the Base Services Charge. Corrections run through our editorial policy, and our data sources page lists the files behind these numbers.

Territory references: CPUC South Orange County Reliability Enhancement and SDG&E about us.