Solar Panel Cost in Idaho (2026)

Net metering: Idaho Power real-time net billing with season and time-varying export credits

Idaho Power moved non-legacy on-site generation customers to real-time net billing following Case IPC-E-23-14. The structure has two halves. Generation your household consumes on site as it is produced continues to offset your usage, which is the most valuable outcome and is unaffected by the export rate. Generation exported to the grid is compensated per kilowatt hour at an avoided-cost-based export credit rate that varies by season and by time of export. What makes Idaho unusual is the size of that variation. Recent rates have run at approximately 14.0598 cents per kWh for summer on-peak exports, 1.7682 cents for summer off-peak, and 0.9540 cents for all exported energy outside the summer season. That is roughly a fifteenfold spread between the best and worst hours, far wider than in most time-varying tariffs. The consequence is that when you export matters far more here than how much you export in total. A kilowatt hour delivered to the grid on a summer afternoon is worth about fifteen times one delivered on a November morning, so a battery that can hold generation for the summer on-peak window is doing something genuinely valuable, and load shifting to raise self-consumption outside summer peak hours is close to free money. The export credit rate is updated annually, and Idaho Power initial filing proposed reducing the average annual rate from around 6.2 cents per kWh to just under 2.5 cents, so confirm the current published figures rather than relying on an older guide. Rocky Mountain Power in eastern Idaho and Avista in the north operate their own arrangements.