What does NEM 3.0 mean for commercial buildings?
NEM 3.0 cut what California utilities pay for exported solar. Compensation dropped sharply from NEM 2.0 levels, so shipping midday power to the grid no longer carries a project. The play now is self-consumption plus storage: size the array to the building's own load, and use a battery to shift midday solar into the evening peak, where the expensive hours live. Under NEM 3.0, design is the difference between an asset and an ornament.
The evening peak, where the battery spends the midday solar it stored
Why does storage fix the NEM 3.0 problem?
NEM 3.0 pays you least at exactly the hour your panels produce most: midday, when the grid is already flooded with solar. A battery breaks that mismatch: instead of exporting surplus at the worst price of the day, the building stores it and spends it during the evening peak, when grid power is at its most expensive.
The same battery also peak-shaves demand charges and, dispatched into CAISO, can earn wholesale revenue in its idle hours. NEM 3.0 didn't kill commercial solar. It made the battery the center of the design.
What changes about system design?
Everything starts from your interval data instead of your roof area. MYNT models the building's load profile against its utility tariff, then sizes solar for self-consumption and the battery for the evening shift and demand-charge kill, not for maximum export that no longer pays. Oversizing an array under NEM 3.0 just donates power to the grid.
Buildings on legacy NEM 2.0 tariffs have their own math: what you change, and when, can affect grandfathered status. That question is answered in the analysis, before anything touches the roof.
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Keep exploring: commercial solar in depth, the payback on solar plus battery, and which incentives apply in 2026.