If you have panels on your roof, there is a bill coming that you have seen exactly zero times this year. It arrives once, it settles twelve months at once, and the average California household owes about $600 on it.
That is the annual True-Up, and most solar owners meet it by surprise.
Here is how the machine actually works. Those monthly statements you have been filing without reading are not bills. They are a scoreboard. In PG&E’s words, credits and charges “are carried forward month to month for 12 billing cycles.” Good months bank a credit. Bad months eat into it. Nothing is settled. Then the twelfth month ends, the utility adds it all up, and sends you the one statement that is real.
Now the part your installer breezed past on the kitchen table.
If you finish the year with credits left over, you do not keep them. PG&E says it flat out: “By law, any remaining credits will be reset to zero before the beginning of your new 12-month billing cycle.” You get Net Surplus Compensation instead. PG&E’s solar bill page puts that at roughly two to four cents a kilowatt-hour, set by the state and floating with wholesale prices. Two cents. That is what a year of power you generated and did not use is worth once the clock resets.
Which tells you what the oversized system you were sold is really doing. Every panel past your own annual usage is not banking money. It is making power you hand over at two cents.
You also owe something every month no matter what. PG&E’s Base Services Charge runs about $24, due whether your panels made 900 kilowatt-hours or nine. Call it $288 a year to stay connected. Panels do not touch it.
So here is the move, and you have to make it before your True-Up date, not after.
Find that date. It is on every monthly solar statement, and for most people it is not January. It is the anniversary of the month your system was switched on. Open the latest statement and look at your running balance.
Then act on which way it points. If you are sitting on a fat credit heading into True-Up, spend it. Charge the car at home instead of at the station. Run the pool pump longer. Do the laundry, pre-cool the house, put off nothing that uses power. A kilowatt-hour you use is worth full retail to you. A kilowatt-hour you bank past the reset is worth two cents.
If you are running a deficit, the opposite, and quickly. Every dollar you shave off usage in the remaining months comes straight off the number on that statement.
Check your math against your real numbers in our solar calculator, and if you are still shopping, our solar ROI guide walks the payback math the same way.
One caveat. If you applied on or after April 15, 2023, you are on the Solar Billing Plan, where export credits are dollar amounts that swing by hour and season rather than banked kilowatt-hours. The annual reconciliation still happens. Only the arithmetic changes. True-Up runs well beyond California too, but the dates, the surplus rate, and the fixed monthly charge are set utility by utility. Pull up your own tariff, not your neighbor’s.
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