Investor-owned utility
New York State Electric & Gas
A patchwork covering roughly 40% of upstate New York's land area but a much smaller share of its people: the Southern Tier, parts of the Finger Lakes, Lockport and eastern Niagara County, Auburn, Ithaca, Binghamton, Elmira, Oneonta, Plattsburgh, and pockets in the lower Hudson Valley. NYSEG territory is disproportionately rural, and that shapes everything from outage duration to hosting capacity.
At a glance
The numbers that decide your project
Default residential rate
SC-1
The default residential classification for NYSEG. Almost every house is on it unless someone deliberately moved you.
All-in cost of energy
$0.17–$0.25 / kWh
Delivery plus supply plus surcharges.
Filed NYSEG residential rates and tariffs · verified Apr 2026Delivery plus default supply plus surcharges. Divide your own bill total by your kWh to find where you sit in this band.
Basic service charge
$20 / month
Solar does not remove this.
Filed NYSEG residential rates and tariffs · verified Apr 2026Basic service charge, billed regardless of usage.
Customer Benefit Contribution
$1.12 / kW-DC / month
About $121 a year on a 9 kW system, for the life of the array.
Filed Customer Benefit Contribution (CBC) rates · verified Jan 2026Applies to systems interconnected on or after January 1, 2022. On a 9 kW-DC system that is roughly $10 a month, or about $120 a year, for the life of the system.
Interconnection timeline
5–14 weeks
Application to Permission to Operate, utility side only.
Observed GridReady quote and bill review sample · verified Apr 2026
VDER / NYISO zones
A (West), C (Central), D (North), E (Mohawk Valley), F (Capital), G (Hudson Valley)
Where the Value Stack applies instead of net metering.
Rates
Residential rate options
| Rate | Type | All-in | Fixed | What it does to storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SC-1 | Flat | $0.17–$0.25 | $20/mo | No arbitrage value |
| SC-1 (voluntary TOU rider) | Time-of-use | $0.10–$0.32 | $20/mo | Some arbitrage value |
Interconnection
What actually slows a project down here
- NYSEG and RG&E share Avangrid's interconnection portal and process, so timelines look similar in both territories.
- Long rural single-phase laterals are the defining constraint. On a lightly loaded rural circuit, a cluster of neighbors going solar can push the line into voltage-rise territory and trigger a study.
- Check the hosting capacity map for your specific circuit before assuming a large system is approvable.
- Restoration after a major storm in rural NYSEG territory is measured in days, not hours. That is the honest input to a backup-power decision here.
Reliability
How the power fails in this territory
The most outage-prone of the major New York territories, driven by rural overhead line miles through wooded terrain. Multi-day restorations after ice and wind events are a recurring feature, not an anomaly.
This is the honest input to a backup-power decision. Buy against the failure mode you actually face, not against the one in the brochure.
Coverage
18 places we cover on NYSEG
Official sources
Check our work
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Other New York utilities
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.