What SGIP Equity and Equity Resiliency pay
California's Self-Generation Incentive Program provides incentives for qualifying distributed energy systems installed on the customer's side of the utility meter, including battery storage systems that can function during a power outage.
It has two higher-value categories. Equity and Equity Resiliency both aim to ensure lower-income, medically vulnerable and at-risk for fire communities are at the front of the line for battery storage incentives. Depending on the category a customer qualifies for, the incentive is $850 per kilowatt hour under Equity or $1,000 per kilowatt-hour under Equity Resiliency.
Those are large numbers relative to what residential storage costs, which is exactly why it is worth establishing eligibility before you design a system rather than after. A project that looks unaffordable at full price may look very different if you qualify.
Separately, Residential Solar and Storage Equity Incentives have been available for reservation since June 2, 2025 to any low-income residential electric or gas customer in California, with the Commission authorising $280 million for that budget.
How to find out whether you qualify
Ask an installer whether you might be eligible, but do not stop there. Confirm with the programme itself, because eligibility criteria and performance requirements are set out in the SGIP Handbook and an installer's answer is not the authoritative one.
Be aware there are obligations attached. Applicants have one year after reserving funds to meet programme requirements, which include customer enrollment in a qualified Demand Response program. That is a condition to understand and accept deliberately, not a footnote.
Ask what a Demand Response programme enrollment actually means for your household in practice, and confirm you are comfortable with it before reserving funds. A year sounds like a long time until the requirements are not what you assumed.
Keep every document from the process. Reservation confirmations, eligibility determinations and correspondence are what you need if anything has to be corrected, and they are easy to lose across a project that runs for months.
The rest of the arithmetic
Since April 15, 2023, customers applying for interconnection in the territories of PG&E, Southern California Edison and SDG&E have taken service on the net billing tariff pursuant to CPUC decision D.22-12-056. Exported electricity is valued at what it is worth to the grid, determined by the Avoided Cost Calculator, rather than at the retail rate.
The utilities are required to publish uniform machine-readable spreadsheets containing the retail export compensation rates on their websites, so the values behind a projection are checkable. Ask which values your installer used and compare them.
Because exports are valued at what they are worth to the grid at the time of export, electricity you consume yourself or store for later is generally worth more. That is the same reason storage matters here, and it is why the SGIP question and the system design question belong together rather than in sequence.
The 30 percent federal Residential Clean Energy Credit under Section 25D expired for property placed in service after December 31, 2025, so a purchase now receives no federal credit. Check any projection line by line rather than trusting a headline figure.
What changed federally, and what California still offers
The 30 percent federal Residential Clean Energy Credit under Section 25D expired for property placed in service after December 31, 2025. A cash or loan purchase made now receives no federal credit, and a quote that still applies it is overstating your return substantially. Check any projection line by line rather than trusting a summary figure.
Section 48E survives at 30 percent and is available to third-party owners of residential systems under leases and power purchase agreements. So the credit still exists, it simply no longer flows to a homeowner who buys the system, and you should expect lease providers to lead with that. Ask what they claim and what of that value actually reaches you in the rate offered, then confirm with a tax advisor rather than with the sales material.
California's Self-Generation Incentive Program continues to provide incentives for battery storage installed on the customer's side of the meter, including systems that can function during a power outage. Its Equity and Equity Resiliency categories are aimed at lower-income, medically vulnerable and at-risk for fire communities.
Depending on the category a customer qualifies for, the incentive is $850 per kilowatt hour under the Equity category or $1,000 per kilowatt-hour under Equity Resiliency. Eligibility criteria and performance requirements are set out in the SGIP Handbook, and applicants have one year after reserving funds to meet them, including enrollment in a qualified Demand Response program. Ask an installer whether you might qualify, and check with the programme rather than taking a sales answer as final.