Solar panels in Moreno Valley

The city itself treats the split as a basic fact of doing any building work here. Moreno Valley's application for a building permit — the form a rooftop solar job goes in on — carries a checkbox near the top labeled electric service provider, with two options: Southern California Edison (SCE) or Moreno Valley Utility (MVU). MVU separately publishes a service area map, produced by the city's GIS division in July 2021, that puts its total territory at 33.48 square miles.

MVU is much the smaller of the two. The City Council created it in 2001, and it served its first customers on February 6, 2004 in the Promontory Park subdivision at Cactus Avenue and Moreno Beach Drive, then grew outward with new development. A 2019 city news release put MVU at roughly 6,800 households and businesses, about 12 percent of the city's population, in the southern and eastern areas of the city; MVU's 2025–2045 business plan now counts more than 9,400 residential and commercial customers on a 12 kV network that is entirely underground. The mapped territory is large next to that customer count because much of the eastern city is still open land. Edison serves everyone else, which is most of the housing stock.

The reason this matters is regulatory. SCE is an investor-owned utility, so it answers to the California Public Utilities Commission. In the CPUC's own words, customers applying for interconnection have taken service on the net billing tariff — the one people call NEM 3.0 — since April 15, 2023, and exported power is credited at a rate reflecting the value of that generation to the grid rather than the retail rate you pay. It applies across PG&E, SCE and SDG&E territory. MVU is a municipal utility owned by the city, so it sits outside that decision entirely. Its rates and service rules are adopted by the Moreno Valley City Council.

MVU runs its own net energy metering program. Interconnection and net metering agreements go through MVU Electric Service Rule 21, and every system carries a non-refundable $75 review fee under that rule. The City Council approved MVU's Residential Rate B time-of-use rate effective December 15, 2020; it is now required for anyone installing solar, a battery, or both, and a customer who nets out as a producer across a billing period still receives a monetary credit. Customers who interconnected earlier were grandfathered for 15 years on the older Schedule NEM and NEM2 rates. Same city, two programs, two different right answers about system size and whether storage is worth it.

Moreno Valley is a logistics city. The World Logistics Center specific plan, approved on November 15, 2015, covers 2,610 acres in the eastern city and allows up to 40.6 million square feet of logistics buildings; MVU's business plan lists an Eastside Substation inside that development as a project still in the negotiation phase. Distribution and light industrial buildings are among the strongest candidates for commercial solar anywhere: acres of flat, unshaded roof over a load that runs during daylight hours, when the array is producing.

There is a rule specific to this city that changes what you can build. MVU's application terms cap commercial systems at no more than 50 percent of a building's minimum daytime load, with anything larger requiring supplemental review. On the residential side, sizing cannot exceed one year of usage history, and where there is no history MVU applies a published formula based on the number of units and the square footage of the home. MVU also retains any net surplus energy along with the environmental attributes and renewable energy credits attached to it — so oversizing an MVU array doesn't bank value the way owners often assume. An SCE-served building on the other side of the line is not subject to those caps. The same warehouse can support very different array sizes depending on which utility meters it.

The federal 48E investment tax credit for commercial projects is still available in 2026, which is part of why the math holds up better on a warehouse roof here than on a house. The first question on any building is still which utility serves it, because that decides whether the 50 percent daytime-load cap applies at all. Start with our commercial solar page or request a commercial assessment.

We serve the wider Inland Empire from Northridge, including neighboring Riverside, which runs a municipal utility of its own, and Fontana up the 60 and 215 corridor.