Solar + Battery Backup for Outages & PSPS in California (2026)

• Solar alone will not run your home in an outage. Grid-tied inverters must disconnect within about 2 seconds (UL 1741 / IEEE 1547) — a solar-only home goes dark with the grid, even at noon.
• What works: battery + backup-capable inverter + a defined backup circuit. Solar then recharges the battery by day through multi-day events.
• A realistic critical-loads day is about 7 kWh (fridge, lights, WiFi, furnace fan, a medical device, a pump) — one ~13.5 kWh battery covers roughly a day and a half.
• Central AC changes everything: ~10 kWh/day on its own, which is why whole-home summer backup usually needs two or more batteries.
• Budget without subsidies: the 30% federal credit is unavailable for systems placed in service after December 31, 2025, and SGIP’s main tiers closed to new applications the same day.

Every grid-tied inverter sold in the U.S. is required to include anti-islanding protection under the safety standards UL 1741 and IEEE 1547. When utility power disappears, the inverter must detect the loss and stop energizing your wiring within roughly two seconds. This prevents your panels from back-feeding a "dead" grid and electrocuting a lineworker who is repairing it.

The consequence for you: if you have solar only — no battery — your panels go dark the instant the grid does, even at noon on a sunny day. During a multi-day PSPS (Public Safety Power Shutoff), when your utility deliberately cuts power to reduce wildfire risk, a solar-only home is just as dark as a home with no solar at all.

Notice the pattern: a critical-loads setup — fridge, lights, WiFi, furnace fan, a medical device, and a pump — lands around 7 kWh per day. A single 13.5 kWh battery carries that for roughly a day and a half. Add central AC and you jump by ~10 kWh/day on its own, which is why true whole-home backup through a summer heat wave often needs two or more batteries.

Battery backup is not cheap, and anyone quoting a single tidy number is guessing. Installed pricing depends on battery brand, how many you stack, panel condition, and whether you back up a critical subpanel or the whole house. As approximate, install-varies 2026 ranges:

California’s Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP) is a stack of tiers, and per the program’s own metrics the General Market, Equity and Equity Resiliency budgets all stopped accepting new applications on December 31, 2025. The one residential pathway still open in 2026 is the income-qualified Residential Solar & Storage Equity (RSSE) budget — and it is fully reserved, taking waitlist applications only.

The practical planning rule follows directly: model your battery cost without an SGIP rebate. If you later qualify through the RSSE waitlist, treat it as upside rather than part of the budget. Which tier you might fall into, the rates and the waitlist mechanics are covered in our dedicated guide to SGIP battery incentives.

If you are an SCE, PG&E, or SDG&E customer who installs solar today, you are on NEM 3.0 (the Net Billing Tariff), which pays far less for exported energy than the old rules. That makes a battery more valuable for bill savings too — you store cheap daytime solar and use it during expensive peak hours instead of exporting it cheaply. On SCE's TOU plans, summer weekday peaks run roughly 58¢/kWh (4–9pm) to 74¢/kWh (5–8pm), and battery/solar customers are placed on the required TOU-D-PRIME plan.

LADWP customers are on a municipal utility — not NEM 3.0 — with residential Tier 1 energy around 24–26¢/kWh and summer Tier 3 near 39–41¢/kWh, billed every two months. The economics differ, but the outage physics are identical: no battery, no power when the grid is down.

One caution: a battery sized purely for bill arbitrage may be discharged low by evening exactly when an outage could start. If resilience is your goal, tell your installer to reserve a backup minimum in the battery.

Cali Energy is a Northridge-based, in-house installer (CSLB #1032379 — B, C-10, C-39) serving LADWP, SCE, and the Burbank/Glendale municipal territories. We design backup around the loads you actually need to keep running, walk you through critical-loads vs. whole-home honestly, and model costs with today's incentive reality — not last year's tax credit. Call +1 (323) 844-7777 for a straight assessment. See our completed installations across LA.

Figures on this page come from the primary sources below and, where noted, from Cali Energy calculations using the stated assumptions. Rates, incentives, and program terms change; each was verified August 18, 2026.

1. EIA — Electric Power Monthly (avg residential rates)
2. IRS — Residential Clean Energy Credit
3. CPUC — Net Billing Tariff (NEM 3.0)
4. SelfGenCA — SGIP Program Metrics
5. SCE — Time-Of-Use Residential Rate Plans
6. LADWP — Residential Electric Rates
7. U.S. DOE — Estimating Appliance and Home Electronic Energy Use
8. UL 1741 — Inverters, Converters, Controllers for Distributed Energy Resources
9. IEEE 1547 — Interconnection Standard