How to read your NV Energy bill once you have solar

Your net metering bill has one block that explains everything, and it is not the account summary. It is the meter readings table. Four codes run down it: kWhD is what NV Energy delivered to you, kWhR is what you sent back, kWhA is an old bank of kilowatt hours, and kWhN is the net. Everything else on the page follows from those.

Every figure below comes from NV Energy's own rate schedule, its net metering pages and the statute. The sample statements are invented. We do not reproduce anybody's bill.

The four codes

NV Energy publishes a line by line guide to a Southern Nevada net meter statement. These are its definitions.

Two things follow immediately. kWhD is not your household's consumption, it is only the part you bought, which is everything your roof did not cover at that moment. If you are still working out why the bought part is so large, start with why your NV Energy bill is so high. And kWhG minus kWhR is the part your system made that you used inside the house without it ever crossing the meter, which is the most valuable energy on the page and the part no line item names.

Which rate you are on

If your system is 25 kW or smaller and was installed after June 2017, you are almost certainly on NMR-405, Tier 4. NV Energy's interconnection handbook, revision 7 dated October 16 2025, calls it the default net metering rate for newly installed systems of 25 kW or less.

If none of this is familiar yet, net metering in Nevada in plain English is the shorter version of the whole scheme. Southern Nevada nets monthly. The 15 minute netting people talk about online is a northern Nevada rate, for applications approved on or after October 1 2025. It does not apply to Clark County. If a neighbour tells you your exports are settled every quarter hour, they are reading about Reno.

A summer month, worked

Invented numbers, a hot month, a system that cannot keep up with two air conditioners.

NV Energy nets the export against the delivery inside the billing period, so you are billed at the consumption rate on 540 kilowatt hours, not 1,180. At the Schedule RS consumption rate of $0.11622 that is $63.61.

The rest of the statement does not use 540. NV Energy's bill guide says the temporary green power financing, renewable energy program and energy efficiency lines and the universal energy charge are assessed on the total kilowatt hours delivered to your home. NRS 704.773 says the same thing in law: where a charge is calculated on a kilowatt hour rate, a net metering customer may only be charged for kilowatt hours of energy the utility delivered to them. So those lines run on 1,180.

Put that together with the $18.00 basic service charge and the 5 percent Clark County local government fee and the month lands near $89.55. Your house used about 1,960 kilowatt hours. You paid for 540 of them.

That example assumes the policy lines ride on delivered kilowatt hours. Check yours: the kilowatt hour figure printed beside each line tells you which base NV Energy used.

A spring month, and where the 75 percent shows up

Same invented house in April. Mild weather, long days.

Now exports beat deliveries by 480 kilowatt hours. NV Energy's net metering answers put it plainly: when excess energy remains after the month is netted, you receive a credit of 75 percent of the retail volumetric rate, less public policy charges, and it is placed in a carryover bank.

The retail volumetric rate is the electric consumption rate plus the deferred energy component. On the schedule effective July 1 2026 that is $0.11622 plus $0.00000. Seventy five percent of it is $0.08717. So the 480 kilowatt hours become $42.41 in the bank. What that discount does to the way a system should be sized is the subject of what 75 percent of retail actually costs you.

And the bill that month is still about $19.58, because the basic service charge, the local government fee and the per kilowatt hour policy lines on the 210 delivered kilowatt hours are all still there, and the credit is not allowed to pay them.

Why you still get a bill in a month you covered

This is the sentence most people are looking for, and NV Energy prints it in its own bill guide: if there is no energy delivered to your home during the billing period, you pay the basic service charge and the local government fee to retain electric service.

On Schedule RS the basic service charge is $18.00 a month. The NMR-405 page adds the rest: credits can be applied to future energy consumption charges, and credits cannot be applied to the basic service charge, additional meter charges or local government fees. NRS 704.775 puts a harder version of it in statute: the value of excess electricity must not be used to reduce any other fee or charge imposed by the utility.

So there is a floor under your bill, it is about nineteen dollars in Clark County today, and no amount of production gets under it. A company that told you the bill would go to almost nothing was describing the energy charge and leaving out the floor.

The lines that have nothing to do with your solar

Six small per kilowatt hour lines sit under the energy charge and confuse people who are hunting for the effect of their panels. They were there before you had solar and they are all defined in NV Energy's own documents.

None of them depend on whether you own panels, and together they come to less than a third of a cent per kilowatt hour. If your bill went up after solar, the cause is somewhere else, and the article on exactly that walks through the usual four.

Where your credits go, and where they do not

• They roll over. NRS 704.775 says excess may be carried forward to later billing periods indefinitely. There is no annual reset that wipes the bank.
• They stay with the address. NV Energy's page says credits are tied to the premise, and that if you move service to another location or end service, remaining credits are not transferable and not payable. The statute agrees: no compensation for what is left if the system stops operating or is disconnected, if you stop being a customer at that address, or if you transfer the system to somebody else.
• On a time of use schedule they stay in their own period. Carried forward excess has to be added back to the same time of use period it came from. A pile of cheap off peak surplus does not pay for an expensive summer evening. That is the mechanism behind every online complaint about NV Energy putting solar production in buckets, and it is the reason a time of use plan and a solar array need to be assessed together rather than one after the other. We work that pairing through in time of use with solar.

What the statement tells you when nobody answers the phone

Your bill is a diagnostic tool, and for thousands of Las Vegas households it is now the only one left, because the company that installed the system is gone. Four readings are worth acting on.

1. kWhR is zero in a sunny month. Nothing is reaching the grid. Either the system is off, the inverter has failed or it was never switched over properly.
2. kWhG has stopped moving while the panels are still up there in full sun.
3. kWhD is back at your pre-solar numbers. Compare against the usage graph from the year before the system went in.
4. You have never once seen an excess energy credit line, not even in April or October. On a correctly sized Las Vegas system those are the months that bank.

There is a longer checklist in how to find out if your system still works, and the whole situation, including what happens to your warranty, in your solar company went out of business. Any one of those four readings is worth a licensed electrician looking at the array, the rapid shutdown devices and the inverter. We do that as a fixed price inspection whether or not you ever buy anything else from us, and we are not connected to whoever installed it.

One thing changes in January 2027

NV Energy plans to break a daily demand component out of the energy rate for southern Nevada, priced at $0.14 per kW of your highest 15 minutes of use in a day. It is scheduled for January 1 2027, under appeal, after a Las Vegas judge denied the attorney general's petition against it in May 2026 and Attorney General Aaron Ford said he would take it to the Nevada Supreme Court. NV Energy's own page says rooftop solar customers in southern Nevada can expect a small increase in their bills when it starts. We keep the daily demand charge page current as that moves.

We recheck this page quarterly. Last checked 2026-09-19. If a number here has moved, tell us and we will fix it the same week.