California community solar sign up start date explained
California community solar sign up start date has not arrived yet. Enrollment cannot open until 3 of the biggest utilities in California finish a state mandated filing on their own marketing plans. The California Public Utilities Commission, the state agency that regulates utility rates and service, adopted D.26-06-006 on June 17, 2026, creating a Community Renewable Energy Program that lets a household buy into a shared solar project it does not own and receive a discount on the electricity that project produces. The decision gives Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Southern California Edison Company and San Diego Gas and Electric Company 90 days from that date to each file a Tier 2 advice letter, a formal filing a utility must submit to the regulator before making a change like this one. That filing has to include draft marketing materials for Commission staff to review. MAOWCE calculates the 90 day window ends around September 15, 2026.
The decision own summary of how it changed in response to party comments states the Commission decided to provide 90 days from the issue date for the utilities to file, extending the 90 day figure past what an earlier section of the same decision had proposed. MAOWCE presents this as the proposed figure and the figure the decision finally requires, not as 2 sources in disagreement, since both numbers come from 1 document describing its own revision.
Show the numbers
| Originally proposed | 60 |
| Finally required | 90 |
What each marketing plan must tell customers
Every filing also has to state plainly that the utility, not the subscriber, keeps the renewable energy credits the shared project generates, the certificates that document power came from a clean source. A subscriber pays for the electricity and the discount, not the certificate behind it. The filing must include outreach to small businesses too, with at minimum engagement with the Commission Small Business Program, an office inside the regulator that helps small business customers navigate rate programs. That outreach requirement exists because commercial customers already lag far behind residential ones in these programs. Community solar programs across California, not the new one, already count 125,000 residential subscribers against 60,000 commercial subscribers statewide, according to a Commission count published in April 2026.
Both figures describe every existing California community solar program combined, published April 23, 2026, months before this decision existed. Neither figure describes the new Community Renewable Energy Program, which has enrolled no one yet. Shown here only to size the gap the decision cites as the reason for its small business outreach requirement.
Show the numbers
| Residential subscribers | 125,000 |
| Commercial subscribers | 60,000 |
What the law requires, and what the regulator added
Public Utilities Code Section 769.3, the law the legislature passed to create this program, sets the low income capacity share at 51% and the formula for the bill credit. Reading that statute directly next to the decision shows the marketing materials requirement, the credit ownership disclosure and the small business outreach requirement appear nowhere in the law itself. All 3 are the regulator own addition, written into the decision that implements the law, not into the law the legislature passed.
Why a fuller marketing plan waits on money that is gone
A more detailed marketing plan, the kind that would need its own budget, is only required later, in a bigger filing called a Tier 3 advice letter, and only if a utility later finds an outside source of money after its tariff already exists. Both outside funding sources this program was counting on are already gone. A 33 million dollar state set aside reverted to the general fund June 27, 2026, and a federal Solar for All grant was terminated in litigation August 7, 2025. If no solar developer signs a power purchase agreement, a contract to buy the electricity a shared project produces, within 2 years of a utility launching its own program, that utility can shut the program down with a simple Tier 1 advice letter, the simplest of the 3 filing types. The community solar page Pacific Gas and Electric Company operates, read this month, still tells customers to expect more details in 2025, a year that has already passed.