Imperial Irrigation District · IID Net Billing
IID net metering, explained for homeowners.
Net metering under the Imperial Irrigation District doesn't exist in the CPUC sense — and that's the first thing a Coachella Valley homeowner needs to know. IID is community-owned public power serving the valley east of the Washington Street corridor (La Quinta, Indio, Coachella, and parts of the east valley), regulated by its own elected board rather than the CPUC, so NEM 3.0 simply doesn't apply. IID's program is called Net Billing: consumption bills at your retail rate, and exported solar credits at a variable rate — currently about 7¢/kWh — pegged to IID's wholesale solar costs. Retail rates here have historically been roughly half of SCE's next door, but board-approved increases are lifting them steeply through 2027, which changes the math every year. Helios models IID's actual current rates and designs for self-consumption, and the owner signs off on every design.
Imperial Irrigation District
How net metering works on IID.
IID replaced its capped net-metering program with Net Billing in 2016, and it works differently from anything on the CPUC utilities. Your consumption is billed at IID's retail rate — about 22¢/kWh in 2026 under the district's current rate schedule, up sharply from prior years and scheduled to keep climbing through 2027–28. Your exports are credited monthly at the Distributive Self-Generation Service Rate, currently about 7¢/kWh — a variable rate tied to IID's lowest-cost wholesale solar contracts that the district can adjust.
The design implication is the same lesson NEM 3.0 taught the rest of Southern California, arrived at by a different road: exporting is a poor business, self-consumption is the whole game. An oversized array chasing export credits earns 7¢ where it could be saving 22¢ — so the right IID system is sized to your actual daytime load, with pool pumps and EV charging scheduled into the solar window, and often a battery carrying the evening.
There's no participation cap on IID Net Billing, and interconnection runs through IID's Distributed Interconnection Unit — a process we handle end to end, including the desert-specific engineering (module temperature coefficients, racking airflow) that Coachella Valley heat demands.
Storage on IID
Should you add a battery?
On IID, a battery is about arithmetic, not ideology. The gap between what exports earn (~7¢) and what retail costs (~22¢ and climbing) is the battery's daily paycheck: every stored kilowatt-hour you use after sunset saves the difference. Because IID retail rates are still well below SCE's, paybacks run longer than on the CPUC utilities — but IID's board-approved increases (roughly 69% across 2025–2027) are closing that gap fast, and the valley's brutal cooling loads give storage plenty to do. We model your actual IID schedule and show solar-only versus solar-plus-battery honestly; for many homes, starting solar-only with a battery-ready design is the right sequence here.
IID cities we serve.
Helios designs and installs solar across 1 IID community in Southern California. Pick your city for local sun hours, fire-zone notes, and a market-specific quote.
IID net metering questions, answered.
- Does NEM 3.0 apply to IID customers in the Coachella Valley?
- No. IID is community-owned and regulated by its own elected board, not the CPUC, so NEM 3.0 has never applied. IID runs its own Net Billing program: retail-rate billing for what you use, and a variable export credit — currently about 7¢/kWh — for what you send back.
- What does IID pay for exported solar?
- IID's Distributive Self-Generation Service Rate — currently about 7¢/kWh, credited monthly. It's a variable rate pegged to IID's lowest wholesale solar contract costs, and the district can adjust it, which is why we design for self-consumption rather than export income.
- Is solar worth it on IID with its cheaper electricity?
- Increasingly. IID's famously low rates are climbing roughly 69% across the 2025–2027 board-approved updates — about 22¢/kWh in 2026 and rising — while desert cooling loads are among the largest in California. A right-sized, self-consumption-first system locks in against that climb.
- Which Coachella Valley cities are IID versus SCE?
- The boundary runs roughly along Washington Street: Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, and most of Palm Desert are SCE; La Quinta, Indio, and Coachella are IID, with parcel-level exceptions near the line. We verify your address with the utility before modeling anything, because the two programs reward different designs.
Get a transparent IID quote.
Free home assessment, no pressure. We model net metering on your exact IID rate — solar-only and solar+battery — with payback period and every line-item cost.