The one state incentive table we can quote from the regulator

The Self-Generation Incentive Program is administered under the California Public Utilities Commission. Its rate table sorts households into budget categories, and the difference between the top and bottom rows is a factor of more than seven. These are that table’s cells for its four residential-category rows, transcribed in the order the regulator prints them, before we set them out in columns. Three of the four are marked as available through 2025, so the table shows what the categories were, not which of them is open to a household today:

Multiply those against a real pack and the spread becomes concrete. On the 10 kilowatt-hour unit used elsewhere on this site, the equity storage rate of $1,100 ^[1] is worth $11,000. Set that against the installed price on your own quote rather than against an average: this site holds no installed-cost dataset, so it cannot say what share of an installation that is. The general small residential rate of $150 ^[2] is worth $1,500 on the same pack.

Two further budgets sit in between: a resiliency rate of $1,000 ^[3] for customers meeting its own criteria, and a regional residential rate of $1,100 ^[4] tied to a specific geography and utility pair.

Notice the unit in the rate column. These are dollars per kilowatt-hour of installed storage, so the rebate grows with the size of the pack — and that quietly argues for buying a larger one than the rest of this site would recommend. It is worth being precise about when that argument holds and when it does not.

In this site’s model, capacity beyond what your household consumes during the expensive window earns nothing on the bill, because the model discharges the pack only into that window. A per-kilowatt-hour rebate does not change that: it reduces the price of the extra capacity without giving the extra capacity anything to do in the model. On the general small residential rate of $150, an unused kilowatt-hour is bought at full price less $150 and still returns zero on the bill, which is a discount on a purchase rather than a reason to make it.

At the equity rate the arithmetic can change, depending on your quote. Divide $1,100 a kilowatt-hour by your own quote’s price per usable kilowatt-hour and you have the share of each kilowatt-hour’s price the rebate pays for. Where a rebate covers most of the marginal capacity, capacity that earns nothing in this bill model can still be worth having for the outage it covers — but that is a resilience decision made with a subsidy, not a savings decision, and the two should be written down separately.

The rule we apply on the worksheet: enter the rebate, then check whether the pack is still above the ceiling the sizing tool prints. A rebate that makes an oversized pack affordable has not made it useful.

Three of the four rows carry a closing note in the regulator’s own table. We reproduced that wording exactly rather than paraphrasing it, because “available through” a year that has already passed is precisely the kind of detail a marketing page drops while keeping the attractive number.

A rate in the table is also not proof that money remains. Each budget is a set amount: the regulator’s page states the funding authorized for the equity budget, and applicants reserve funds against it. Check the programme administrator’s own status for your budget at the moment you apply.

Our own position on this: the calculator takes a rebate figure from you rather than selecting one for you. If you have a written confirmation of a rate, enter it. If you have a table entry and a hope, enter zero and treat any rebate that arrives as an improvement on the answer rather than a load-bearing part of it.