Short answer: the two things a solar quote is built on are how many kilowatt-hours your home uses over a full year and which SCE rate plan you are on. Both are on your bill or in your SCE My Account. If an installer designs a system without those, they are guessing, and under Net Billing a guess is expensive. Here is what to look for on an SCE residential bill in Palmdale or Lancaster, in the order it matters.
1. Total kWh used, for twelve months, not one
The single most important number on the bill is the kilowatt-hours (kWh) used in the billing period. It sits near the top of the bill next to the meter read dates. One month is not enough. Air conditioning drives Antelope Valley usage, so a July bill and a February bill for the same house can look like two different homes. A system sized from a winter bill will be too small; one sized from an August bill will overproduce for nine months and export power for pennies under NEM 3.0.
You do not need to dig through a drawer. In SCE My Account, the Billing & Payment History page shows up to 36 months of bill charges and lets you download PDFs of past bills. For hourly detail, use Green Button Download My Data under Data Sharing & Download in My Account. It exports interval usage in 15- or 60-minute steps depending on your meter, which is what a careful installer uses to model production against your actual daily pattern.
2. Your rate plan name
Look for the rate schedule printed on the bill. For SCE homes it is usually one of these:
- TOU-D-4-9PM. Time-of-use. Summer weekday on-peak is 4 to 9 p.m., which is exactly when a solar array is winding down for the day.
- TOU-D-5-8PM. Time-of-use with a shorter, later on-peak window of 5 to 8 p.m. on summer weekdays.
- TOU-D-PRIME. Time-of-use with on-peak from 4 to 9 p.m. and a higher fixed monthly charge in exchange for lower energy rates. SCE moves Solar Billing Plan customers onto this plan, so it is the one to model your solar and battery against.
- Domestic (tiered). Also called Schedule D. Price depends on how much you use, not when. The first block up to your baseline allocation is billed at the lowest rate and everything above it costs more.
Why it matters: under a time-of-use plan, the value of a solar kilowatt-hour depends on the hour. Power you use at noon offsets a cheap rate; power you buy at 7 p.m. costs the most. That gap is the whole argument for pairing solar with battery storage in SCE territory. If your bill shows a tiered plan today, your installer still needs to model the time-of-use plan you will move to after interconnection.
3. Baseline allocation and tiers
On a tiered bill you will see a baseline allocation in kWh. SCE assigns each community to a baseline region based on its climate, and the daily allowance is larger in the summer season (June through September) than in winter. Hot inland and desert regions get more baseline kWh than the coast, which is SCE’s acknowledgment that a Palmdale home simply needs more electricity to stay livable in August. Usage above baseline is billed at the higher tier, so the kWh you cut with solar on a tiered plan are the most expensive ones first.
To find your region, SCE publishes a baseline region map and an index of communities in its tariff books. The allocation itself is set by the California Public Utilities Commission and also depends on whether your primary heat is electric.
4. Delivery charges and generation charges
SCE bills split into two halves. Delivery is the cost of the wires, poles, transformers and the crews that fix them. Generation is the cost of the electricity itself. Both are charged per kWh, and solar reduces both because you are buying fewer kilowatt-hours overall. What solar does not touch is anything that is not billed per kWh, which brings us to the next two lines.
5. The Base Services Charge
Newer SCE bills carry a Base Services Charge, a flat daily amount that replaced the old basic charge. SCE lists it at $0.80 per day for standard residential customers, with reduced amounts for CARE and FERA households. SCE is explicit that it is not based on energy use, cannot be lowered by using less, and applies to solar customers too. Over a year that is a few hundred dollars that no system of any size will remove.
6. Non-bypassable charges
Folded into the per-kWh rates are non-bypassable charges: set fees for public purpose programs, the wildfire fund and similar items that every SCE customer pays. SCE’s Solar Billing Plan FAQs state that solar credits can reduce energy charges, but fixed fees, non-bypassable charges and taxes are not eligible for reduction. They are small per kWh, but they are why even a home that produces more than it uses still gets a bill.
7. Lancaster Energy on a Lancaster bill
If your service address is inside the city of Lancaster, the generation half of your bill probably comes from Lancaster Energy, the city’s community choice program. Nothing changes physically: SCE still delivers the power, maintains the grid, handles outages and sends one bill, with Lancaster Energy’s generation charges printed on it. For solar, the interconnection is still with SCE, and Lancaster Energy runs its own net energy metering program for its customers with an annual settlement in the October billing cycle. Bring the whole bill, both halves, to any installer so the model reflects the generation rate you actually pay.
8. The summer months set the system size
When you lay the twelve bills side by side, the June through September kWh will tower over the rest. That is the Antelope Valley pattern, and it is why cookie-cutter system sizes from coastal cities do not transfer here. The right design covers the summer load without wildly overproducing in spring and fall, and it puts a share of that summer production into a battery for the 4 to 9 p.m. window instead of exporting it at low credit rates. The trade-offs are covered in our guide to what solar costs in Palmdale.
What to have ready when you ask for a quote
- Twelve months of kWh usage, or your Green Button export.
- Your current rate plan name from the bill.
- The service address exactly as it appears on the bill, so the utility account matches.
- A few photos of the roof from the ground, plus any recent re-roof or repair dates.
- A photo of your main electrical panel with the door open, showing the main breaker rating.
- Anything coming: an EV, a pool, an ADU, a heat pump. Future load changes the size.
Red flags on the sales side
- A design from one bill. If nobody asked for a year of data, the system size is a guess.
- “Eliminate your bill.” The Base Services Charge and non-bypassable charges say otherwise, and SCE says so in writing.
- Savings shown against your tiered rate. After interconnection you will be on a time-of-use plan under the Solar Billing Plan. The model should use that.
- No mention of exports. Any proposal in SCE territory that does not separate self-consumed kWh from exported kWh is skipping the part of the math that changed in 2023.
- A federal tax credit in the numbers. The residential credit ended for systems placed in service after December 31, 2025. It should not appear in a 2026 homeowner-purchase quote.
If you would rather not decode the bill yourself, send it to us through the contact page. We pull the usage, model it hour by hour against the plan you will actually be on, and show you the result with and without a battery. Payment options, including $0-down loans, are laid out on the financing page.
Sources
- SCE: View or download past bills (36 months of history in My Account)
- SCE: Share My Data and Green Button Download My Data (15- or 60-minute interval usage)
- SCE: Time-of-use residential rate plans (TOU-D-4-9PM, TOU-D-5-8PM, TOU-D-PRIME on-peak hours)
- SCE: Tiered rate plan (baseline allocation by region, season and heating type)
- SCE tariff books: Baseline regions map
- SCE: Base Services Charge ($0.80/day standard; applies to solar customers)
- SCE: Solar Billing Plan FAQs (fixed fees, non-bypassable charges and taxes not reduced by credits)
- SCE: Solar glossary (non-bypassable charges, energy export credits, settlement statement)
- Lancaster Energy: FAQs (single SCE bill, SCE delivery and outages, net energy metering program)
