Best Powerwall settings for SDG&E EV-TOU-5 on NEM 3.0
EV-TOU-5 in plain English: SDG&E’s overnight-EV rate, on the post-2023 solar billing scheme (NEM 3.0).
A 74¢ evening peak against 14¢ super-off-peak overnight power is the widest spread in America. On NEM 3.0, your battery isn’t an accessory — it is the economics.
The plan at a glance
| Period | Hours | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| On-peak | 4:00–9:00 PM, every day | $0.74/kWh |
| Off-peak | 6:00 AM–4:00 PM & 9:00 PM–midnight | $0.39/kWh |
| Super off-peak | Midnight–6:00 AM | $0.14/kWh |
EV-TOU-5 carries a small monthly EV adder in exchange for the deep overnight rate. Rates come from the published tariff as reflected in SolDial's rate database in mid-2026 — always verify current numbers with your utility.
What this plan means for a Powerwall
Do the arithmetic once and it changes how you see the machine on your wall: energy stored at 14¢ and discharged at 74¢ earns ~54¢ per kWh after losses. A Powerwall cycling 10 kWh into every evening peak is avoiding roughly $140–160/month of peak purchases. No other plan in the country pays a battery this well for such a simple behavior.
NEM 3.0 is the other half of the story: exports earn avoided-cost rates (often single-digit cents), so shipping solar to the grid mid-day is nearly worthless. The order of operations is battery first, house second, grid last. Charge the pack from super-off-peak power overnight if solar won’t fill it; never let stored energy export at NEM 3 rates.
Settings: Time-Based Control, grid charging on (the midnight–6 AM window is the whole point), reserve 20–30%, exports solar-only.
The automations worth having
A super-off-peak charge window that fills the pack by 6 AM on low-solar days; a pre-peak hold so 4 PM always arrives with a full battery; EV charging pinned to the same midnight window; and storm watch to abandon arbitrage when an outage threatens. This is exactly the plan SolDial’s Autopilot was built to run daily without you thinking about it.
Does this apply to my exact situation?
Plans vary by zone, season, and enrollment vintage, and utilities revise rates. SolDial matches your account to the actual published schedule from ~50,000 tariffs and recomputes the strategy — and the honest savings math — from your windows, not a blog’s snapshot. If your plan differs from this page, the app follows your plan.