SGIP California home battery rebate 2024

One of the best home battery incentives in the country is California's Self-Generation Incentive Program, or SGIP, rebate. It benefits homeowners who want to install a home battery with their solar panels, and typically covers about 15-20% of an average battery’s cost. 

Some of the biggest benefits of SGIP exist to help California residents who’ve experienced hardship due to natural disasters. If you’ve incurred property loss or damage due to wildfires or are a low-income utility customer, you may be eligible to have most of your battery storage costs covered –  if not taken care of completely. It’s become much easier for homeowners to access the benefits. Here's everything you need to know about the SGIP rebate.

Equity Resiliency Budget

A 2018 California law created the Equity Resiliency Budget ,which provided an additional $800 million in funding for SGIP, and extended it until 2025. The Equity Resiliency Budget, in part, allocates SGIP funds for qualifying solar projects for lower income Californians, people living in fire zones, and those with serious illnesses.

Some of the qualifying criteria includes:

• Customers that have notified their utility of serious illness or condition that could become life-threatening if electricity is disconnected

• Customers categorized as "low income"

• Customers residing in Tier 3 or 4 fire risk zone

SGIP supports various "behind the meter" technologies installed at your home or business, including energy storage, fuel cells, and combined heat and power generators.

Until recently, applying for a home battery rebate through SGIP was difficult, particularly for residential customers. The program funds became available on a specific day, and the vast majority were claimed very quickly by industrial-sized energy storage projects, leaving nothing left for homeowners interested in small home batteries.

Luckily for homeowners looking to invest in battery storage in California, the program has made changes to promote residential battery projects, such as tiering the program to allow smaller homes to compete for funds alongside larger industrial projects..

Homeowners who are either PG&E, SCE, SCG, or SDG&E customers are eligible for an incentive as high as $300 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) when they install a home battery. That's enough to cover the majority of your battery costs. The value of the per-kWh incentive depends on the battery size you purchase and is reduced as more batteries are installed across the state, so it pays to be an early adopter of home batteries. You can check the current value of the incentive at the SGIP Program Metrics dashboard.

How much could you save on a Tesla Powerwall with SGIP?

The Tesla Powerwall 3 has a 13.5 kWh capacity so it qualifies as large-scale storage. Under SGIP steps 4 and 5, if you have large-scale storage capacity, you're eligible for an incentive rate of $250/kWh, worth $3,375. That's enough to cover a significant portion of the purchase of the Powerwall 3, which is priced at $9,300. Keep in mind, the amount available to you in incentives drops as more people sign up and purchase batteries, so make sure to check what stage SGIP is in before you pull the trigger on your battery purchase. 

Even if you receive a smaller rebate, remember that the SGIP incentive can also be combined with the federal solar tax credit, reducing your total solar and battery installation costs by more than 50%.

Additional benefits of the overhauled SGIP program

About 75% of the program's funds (equal to more than $62 million annually) are explicitly marked for energy storage. This is a departure from past years when more funds were used for fuel cells and other energy production. Fifteen percent of the funds will also be explicitly marked for residential applications to ensure that homeowners who want to install batteries with their solar panels can afford to do so.

Funds are released throughout each year instead of all at once. Funding the program continuously over time aligns more with how most other incentive programs are structured, particularly for solar power. This way, your solar-plus-storage installer can tell you exactly how much of a rebate is available before installing your system.

Home energy storage offers many benefits, particularly if you have a solar panel system on your roof. Installing a home battery allows you to store any excess solar power your system has generated instead of feeding it back into the grid.

Feeding excess power back into the electric grid and receiving credits for it – a process known as net metering – does help balance out your daily electricity use. However, California’s new net metering policy, known as NEM 3, is far less generous than it used to be. The new policy that went into effect in April 2023, cut the compensation rate for excess energy generated by California homeowners  by about 75% for new solar owners. While it’s a disappointing policy change for solar supporters, it makes buying a battery more valuable.

When you install a home battery, you also benefit from backup power if the electric grid goes down. However, most home-use batteries are designed to store just a few hours of electricity so they won’t run your home at full power for multiple days.

California has long led the nation in incentivizing the installation of clean energy technology.  With SGIP, homeowners in Calif. can install a battery as part of their home solar system at little to no additional cost, depending on your qualifications. Combining your SGIP savings with the 30% federal investment tax credit (ITC) can cut your solar-plus-storage costs in half.

The first step to finding the right price for your solar investment is to understand the market in your area. You can use EnergySage'sSolar Data Explorer for California to understand what homeowners in your area are paying for their systems, how much their solar panels are saving them, and how long it would take you to break even if you choose to go solar as well.

If you're ready to explore your solar options, sign up for free on the EnergySage Marketplace. You can access qualified, pre-vetted solar installers local to you and compare multiple quotes side-by-side to figure out what makes the most sense for your particular financial situation. To get quotes for solar-plus-storage systems, you can make a note on your account that you're interested in installation offers that include battery storage.