California Approves Tariff On-Bill Pilot Informed by Dunsky Analysis

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has approved Southern California Edison Company’s Tariff On-Bill (TOB) Pilot, authorizing $7.19 million to test an innovative approach to financing energy efficiency and electrification upgrades. The pilot enables customers to complete building improvements — such as installing heat pumps or weatherization measures — with no upfront costs, repaid through a tariff tied to the utility meter rather than the individual.

This model aims to make energy upgrades more accessible, especially for low- and moderate-income households and renters, while creating a scalable, debt-free mechanism for advancing building decarbonization.

Dunsky and our partners Market Logics and Opinion Dynamics supported this decision by conducting the CPUC’s independent evaluation of proposed TOB pilots from multiple utilities. Our team reviewed each proposal’s design, feasibility, and alignment with the Commission’s equity, affordability, and grid modernization objectives. The— including recommendations for improving methodology, integrating distributed energy resources (DERs), enhancing customer protections, final CPUC decision draws extensively on our findings and strengthening measurement and verification (M&V).

The approved SCE pilot incorporates many of these refinements and allocates more than $1 million to M&V activities, which will help validate real-world savings and inform future programs statewide.

By helping the CPUC identify what makes a tariffed on-bill approach both practical and equitable, our team continues to seek solutions that prioritize making energy not only clean but affordable, efficient, resilient and scalable.

Dunsky has conducted design and evaluation of innovative financing solutions in leading jurisdictions such as California, New York and Ontario for well over a decade.  If you’d like to learn more about our work, we’d love to hear form you.