The grid swapped gas for solar. The IE hosts the buildout — and the bill still went up.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported this month that solar generation across the California grid operator's footprint rose 21% over the first five months of 2026 versus the same stretch in 2024, while natural gas generation fell 60%. Solar beat gas on 82% of days, up from 21% in the prior two years. The headline writes itself: the world's fourth-largest economy swapped its biggest fossil fuel for sunlight.
The catch for anyone running a plant or a warehouse in Fontana or Redlands is that the milestone is a generation-mix story, and generation is the smaller half of the bill. On an SCE bill, generation runs roughly 30% of the total; delivery — the poles, wires, and substations SCE owns — is the other 70%. A cheaper generation fuel moves the smaller lever.
And the larger lever is going the other way. SCE's October 2025 rate change was driven by a $1.685 billion increase to recover its 2025 general rate case, approved by the CPUC in September, plus another $536 million for wildfire-prevention and restoration costs already incurred. Both are delivery-side. Both land on every commercial ratepayer regardless of what's generating the electricity. The grid getting cleaner and the grid getting more expensive are running on separate tracks.
The sharpest tell sits in the generation line itself. In the same window the state celebrated gas losing, SCE removed a $751 million customer refund from generation rates — a refund that existed because natural gas and power prices had come in lower than forecast. Removing it raised rates. So the one place the fuel shift could have shown up on the bill, it showed up as an increase, not a cut.
Meanwhile, the IE is where the new supply is physically going. San Bernardino County's desert hosts a growing share of the solar-and-storage capacity behind the statewide shift — the CEC-approved Soda Mountain project near Barstow (300 megawatts of solar plus 300 megawatts of storage, roughly $700 million) and Clearway's roughly $1 billion Daggett array, which is repowering a retired gas plant. Riverside County's BLM lands carry more in the pipeline. The corridor is becoming the state's generation host, with the construction spend, tax base, and short-term jobs that come with it.
What it isn't becoming is a place where operators pay less. Hosting the clean-energy buildout and benefiting from it on the meter are two different things — and for now, only one of them is happening in the IE.