PG&E rates aren’t flat. They’re highest in the evening when your family uses the most electricity. A solar battery stores cheap daytime power and covers your home through those peak hours — so you skip the most expensive part of every day.
Solar powers your home and charges your battery.
Battery powers your home, not PG&E.
Extra battery energy keeps your home going.
Use stored energy during peak hours when rates are highest.
Keep your home running during outages, automatically.
Predictable energy costs for 25 years, immune to PG&E hikes.
Time-of-use (TOU) pricing means the rate you pay per kilowatt-hour changes throughout the day. PG&E charges the highest rates during the hours most homes use the most electricity — usually a window in the late afternoon and evening. They charge less during the day and overnight, when system-wide demand is lower.
For a typical home in PG&E territory, the difference between off-peak and peak rates is significant. Cooking dinner, running air conditioning, charging an EV, doing laundry, or running the dishwasher during peak hours costs noticeably more than doing the same tasks at noon. Most people never see this clearly on a bill, because the bill bundles everything into a monthly total.
Solar panels produce the most electricity during the middle of the day — precisely when rates are lowest. They produce the least in the evening, when rates are highest. Without a battery, your home buys back from PG&E at peak rates exactly when your panels stop producing.
This is the gap a battery closes. The battery stores your daytime production while rates are low. Then, when peak hours hit and your panels go quiet, the battery feeds your home from its own stored energy instead of pulling from the grid at premium pricing.
It’s tempting to think the savings here are small, because peak hours are only a few hours of the day. The reason they matter so much is that those hours capture the bulk of a typical home’s electricity usage. Most people are home, the kitchen is active, screens are on, and HVAC systems are working their hardest. The hours PG&E charges the most happen to be the hours you use the most.
This is what makes battery storage a structural part of the savings argument, not an add-on. A solar system without a battery still saves on daytime usage, but it leaves the most expensive hours of the day uncovered. A battery brings those hours into the savings.
We size the battery to the home, not to a generic spec. Larger homes with EVs or pool pumps need more storage capacity than smaller homes with modest evening loads. The right sizing depends on your daytime production, your evening usage pattern, and how much of the home you want backed up. That conversation happens during the proposal.
Every qualifying install includes battery storage. Tier-1 manufacturers only — Tesla Powerwall, Franklin Home Power, and Enphase IQ Battery. No separate purchase, no upfront cost.
A short utility bill review shows you which hours of the day cost the most and how much of that a battery would cover. No cost, no pressure.
