PG&E Becomes First US Utility to Surpass 1 Million Customer Solar Interconnections
PG&E says it has connected more than 1 million customer solar systems to its grid, more than any US utility, as California leans on rooftop solar and home batteries.
Overview
Pacific Gas and Electric Company has surpassed 1 million customer solar interconnections, more than any utility in the United States, the company announced on June 4, 2026. The milestone makes PG&E, which serves roughly 16 million people across a 70,000-square-mile territory in northern and central California, the first US utility to cross the one-million mark for grid-connected customer solar systems, according to the PG&E announcement.
What We Know
The one-million figure caps an adoption curve that PG&E traces from limited activity in the 1990s through steady growth in the 2000s and rapid expansion in the 2010s, according to the PG&E announcement. More than half a million of those interconnections were added between 2020 and 2025, and the utility has connected more than 70,000 new solar installations annually over the past two years, the same announcement states.
“PG&E supports solar at every scale and has enabled more solar adoption than any utility in the country,” said Jason Glickman, the company’s Executive Vice President, Strategy and Growth, in the announcement.
The utility framed the milestone around the integration of rooftop solar with battery storage rather than solar generation alone. Paul Dickson, Sunrun’s President and Chief Revenue Officer, said in the PG&E announcement that “Working together, Sunrun and PG&E have built grid-support programs that allow California families—including middle- and lower-income households—to produce, store, and share their own energy with their communities.”
The Virtual Power Plant Test
PG&E’s case for solar-plus-storage rests in part on a July 29, 2025 test in which a fleet of customer-owned home batteries delivered 535 megawatts to the grid for two hours, from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m., according to the PG&E announcement. The exercise tapped roughly 100,000 residential storage batteries supplied by Tesla and Sunrun and involved PG&E alongside Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, CleanTechnica reported.
PG&E characterized the exercise as “the largest test of its kind ever done in California—and maybe the world,” though CleanTechnica noted that Australia operates comparable virtual power plant installations, according to its coverage.
Policy Backdrop
The milestone arrives after a turbulent stretch for California’s rooftop solar market. The state’s NEM 3.0 net billing tariff, approved by regulators at the end of 2022, came into effect for distributed solar interconnection applications submitted on or after April 15, reducing compensation for the electricity that new systems export to the grid, Utility Dive reported. In the year that followed, the research firm Wood Mackenzie projected a 41% contraction in California’s installed residential solar capacity, with rooftop solar sales down between 66% and 83% compared with the same period in 2022, according to Utility Dive.
What We Don’t Know
PG&E’s announcement counts interconnections rather than active systems, and it does not break out how many of the 1 million customer systems pair solar with battery storage. The company also did not disclose the total installed capacity, in megawatts, represented by the 1 million interconnections. How quickly the next million accrues will depend on policy and economics that remain in flux, including the reduced export credits under net billing that contributed to the market contraction documented by Utility Dive.