For most of the last decade the answer to “should I put solar on this” was roughly the same whoever was asking. That stopped being true this year, and which of four situations you are in now changes the answer more than any equipment choice will.
The federal residential credit — §25D — is gone. It ended for anything placed in service after 31 December 2025. No phase-down, no partial year. If you are an owner-occupant paying cash or financing, there is no federal credit. A lot of the industry is still not saying that plainly.
The second change is older and less understood. Under the Net Billing Tariff, what you buy and what you sell are priced very differently: full retail for every kilowatt-hour you import, a much lower avoided-cost rate for every one you export. Producing a lot at noon and shipping it to the grid is no longer the business it was.
Together those mean solar for an owner-occupant is now a question about self-consumption — how much of what the system makes do you actually use, in the hours it makes it. A household empty until six has a very different answer from one home all day.
It is still worth doing for plenty of people. It is not worth doing for everyone, and anyone telling you otherwise in 2026 is selling.
Almost the opposite.
§48E survives. A business-owned system still takes a 30% federal credit, and rental property counts — a landlord-owned system on a single-family rental qualifies as business energy property. On top of that, 100% first-year bonus depreciation is back permanently, and solar is a five-year MACRS asset.
Same roof, same panels, same installer — completely different arithmetic, because of who owns it.
Two caveats before anyone gets excited. Claiming the credit reduces your depreciable basis by half the credit. And for an individual landlord with passive rental income, the credit generally offsets tax on passive income only, not your salary, absent an exception such as real-estate-professional status. That one surprises people.
I am not a tax advisor and none of this is tax advice. But if you own a building and your CPA has not raised solar with you this year, ask them. The window for planning around it is autumn, not December.
Title 24 requires photovoltaic on new dwelling units. It is required scope, not an upgrade — the decision is not whether, it is how well and by whom.
The interesting question on new construction is rarely the panels. It is whether the units are separately metered, where the sub panels sit, and whether the serving utility is investor-owned or municipal. Those decide the cost far more than the equipment does.
There is also a clock: California’s property-tax exclusion for active solar requires completion before 1 January 2027. On anything breaking ground now, that belongs in the schedule conversation.
A battery does not bank power for later in any general sense. It moves it.
What your system makes at midday is worth very little exported; what you buy between four and nine in the evening costs the most. A battery takes production from the cheap hours and hands it back during the expensive ones. That is the whole mechanism.
Which means it is sized to your evenings, not to your roof. Anyone quoting a battery without asking how you use power after six is quoting from a catalogue.
Los Angeles, Pasadena, Glendale, Azusa, Riverside and others run their own utilities and are not under the same tariff. Several still credit exports at or near retail.
If that is you, most of what you have read about NEM 3.0 does not describe your situation, and the battery case is a different conversation entirely. Check the name on your bill before you accept anyone’s assumptions — including mine.
Work out which of those four you are. It moves the answer more than any panel or inverter decision.
Then look at twelve months of your own usage and the name of your rate schedule. Both are already on your bill, and everything honest starts there.
Send us your bill, your plans, or a quote you have already been given. We will tell you what we see, whether or not it turns into anything.
General information as at 3 August 2026, not tax or legal advice. Jinwu holds no tax credential — consult your own CPA and counsel on anything above. Federal and state rules change; verify before relying on any of it.