Local energy intelligence
The Local Energy Playbook
Home energy decisions are local in ways national calculators cannot see. Which utility is on your bill, what the snow load is where you live, how many contractors actually compete for your job, and how long the power stays off when it goes — all four move the answer more than panel brand ever will.
This is our attempt to write that down for every part of New York, honestly, with the source and the date attached to every number. Where we do not have a defensible local figure, we say so instead of filling the gap.
Coverage
What is built
Counties covered
62
All 62 New York counties, 48 of them with town-level pages.
Places with local pages
126
16 of them in the Western New York priority cluster.
Utilities and rate breakdowns
8 utilities · 14 rates
Every residential service classification a New York homeowner can be on.
Pages in the engine
652
Each one generated from the same verified dataset, so a rate change propagates everywhere at once.
What you get
Four questions, answered for your specific address
| Question | Where it is answered | What makes it local |
|---|---|---|
| What does solar actually cost and produce here? | Town-level solar cost pages | Market-specific $/W bands, climate-zone specific yield, and the exact charges your utility keeps billing you at 100% offset. |
| Generator, battery, or solar plus storage? | Town-level backup power guides | Local outage frequency and driver, noise-ordinance reality, and whether your rate gives storage any value beyond outages. |
| What will my rate do to the math? | Utility rate pages | Tariff-level fixed charges, all-in $/kWh, the Customer Benefit Contribution, and TOU arbitrage arithmetic done properly. |
| What does the weather here really do? | County climate pages | Ground snow load, lake-effect exposure, month-by-month production shape, and the roof consequences of all three. |
| Who is going to quote me, and how? | Town-level quote landscape pages | Contractor mix, expected price spread, and the sales tactics that show up in markets of this maturity. |
The fact that changes the most answers: 47 municipal utilities
New York has 47 municipal electric systems. Their customers generally cannot use NY-Sun incentives, are not covered by the state net-metering statute, and pay roughly half what the investor-owned utility next door charges. All three facts change a solar decision, and regional installers routinely miss the boundary.
We cover 20 municipal-territory places explicitly, including Springville, Akron, Jamestown, Fredonia, Westfield. How municipal territories differ →
Priority cluster
Western New York, in depth
Erie County · 21 places
Erie County contains three genuinely different solar climates inside forty miles: the lake plain around Buffalo, the higher Southtowns where the snow bands park, and the flat Niagara frontier north of the city. County averages hide all of it.
Niagara County · 9 places
Niagara County is split between two utilities. Most of the county is National Grid, but eastern Niagara including much of the Lockport area is NYSEG — and NYSEG's Customer Benefit Contribution is $1.12 per kW-DC per month against National Grid's $0.69. On a 9 kW system that difference is about $46 a year, forever. Know which side of the line you are on before you compare quotes.
Chautauqua County · 9 places
Chautauqua County has the highest concentration of municipal electric systems in Western New York: Jamestown, Fredonia, Westfield, Mayville, Silver Creek, and Sherman all run their own. If your bill comes from the village or the BPU rather than National Grid, NY-Sun incentives generally do not apply to you and the state net-metering rules do not bind your utility. This is the most consequential and least-discussed fact about solar in this county.
Statewide
Every New York county
Western New York
Mohawk Valley
Capital Region
The small number is how many town-level pages that county has. Counties without one still have a climate page and utility coverage; town pages get built where we have enough verifiable local data to say something a national calculator cannot.
Utilities
Start from your bill instead
- National Grid (Niagara Mohawk)$0.19–$0.26/kWh all-in · $21/mo fixed
- New York State Electric & Gas$0.17–$0.25/kWh all-in · $20/mo fixed
- Rochester Gas and Electric$0.17–$0.24/kWh all-in · $25/mo fixed
- Central Hudson Gas & Electric$0.22–$0.30/kWh all-in · $25/mo fixed
- Consolidated Edison$0.31–$0.40/kWh all-in · $22/mo fixed
- Orange & Rockland Utilities$0.24–$0.32/kWh all-in · $24/mo fixed
- PSEG Long Island$0.22–$0.29/kWh all-in · $17/mo fixed
- Municipal Electric Systems$0.08–$0.16/kWh all-in · $10/mo fixed
How this is built
Rules we hold ourselves to
- No number without a source and a date. Every figure on every page carries where it came from and when we last checked it, so you can verify our work rather than trusting it.
- No invented local detail. Where we do not have a defensible figure for a place — an outage count, a noise ordinance — the page says we do not have it rather than filling the gap with something plausible.
- The arithmetic is shown. Anywhere we derive a number, the formula is on the page. If you disagree with our inputs you can substitute yours.
- Bands, not point estimates. A single number implies a precision we do not have. Ranges are honest about the spread that genuinely exists.
- Pages have to earn their existence. We run a similarity check across neighbouring locations; if two pages would say substantially the same thing, that is a signal we do not know enough about one of them yet.
- No lead-gen gate. Every calculator linked from these pages runs without an email address.
How this page is built
This is a generated page: the structure is shared across locations, the numbers are not. Every figure comes from the source cited beside it, with the date we last checked it. Nothing here is a quote, an appraisal, or tax advice, and none of it is specific to your roof.
Rates and incentive programs change. We re-verify utility tariffs and NYSERDA program status on a rolling schedule and stamp the date on each number rather than on the page, so you can see which specific figures are fresh. Full methodology · Program status tracker · About the Local Energy Playbook
Page content last reviewed April 2026.