Investor-owned utility
Rochester Gas and Electric
Monroe County and a nine-county ring around Rochester. A compact, mostly suburban territory, which makes it one of the easier ones to build in.
At a glance
The numbers that decide your project
Default residential rate
SC-1
The default residential classification for RG&E. Almost every house is on it unless someone deliberately moved you.
All-in cost of energy
$0.17–$0.24 / kWh
Delivery plus supply plus surcharges.
Filed RG&E 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
$25 / month
Solar does not remove this.
Filed RG&E residential rates and tariffs · verified Apr 2026Basic service charge, billed regardless of usage.
Customer Benefit Contribution
$1.16 / kW-DC / month
About $125 a year on a 9 kW system, for the life of the array.
Filed Customer Benefit Contribution (CBC) rates · verified Jan 2026The second-highest CBC in the state. On a 10 kW-DC system that is roughly $140 a year, every year.
Interconnection timeline
5–13 weeks
Application to Permission to Operate, utility side only.
Observed GridReady quote and bill review sample · verified Apr 2026
VDER / NYISO zones
B (Genesee)
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–$0.24 | $25/mo | No arbitrage value |
| SC-1 (voluntary TOU rider) | Time-of-use | $0.10–$0.32 | $25/mo | Some arbitrage value |
Interconnection
What actually slows a project down here
- Shares Avangrid's process with NYSEG.
- RG&E carries the highest basic service charge of the upstate investor-owned utilities, which means a Rochester-area bill has a larger fixed floor that solar cannot touch.
- Suburban Monroe County circuits generally have healthy hosting capacity; the constraint shows up further out in the rural fringe counties.
Reliability
How the power fails in this territory
Better than NYSEG's rural average and comparable to National Grid's built-up areas. Rochester's mature tree canopy is the main driver of localized outages.
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
13 places we cover on RG&E
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.