A lot of homeowners assume going solar means going up against their utility company. And in some states, utilities have fought residential solar hard, lobbying against it, cutting the value of solar credits, and adding fees designed to slow it down.
But in New York, it’s different.
Every New York Utility Allows Solar
Central Hudson, Con Edison, NYSEG, National Grid, Orange & Rockland, RG&E – all of them connect residential solar systems and credit homeowners for the power they send to the grid. They don’t do this by choice. New York State requires it, and has since 1997, when the state first put net metering into law. The Public Service Commission sets the rules, and the utilities follow them.
Your utility doesn’t evaluate whether it wants your solar system on its grid. It processes your application, swaps your meter, and starts crediting your account. The rules are the same for the retired couple down the road and the family with two EVs in the driveway.
The differences between utilities are real, but they’re only in details: the exact value of a credit, a monthly fee that varies with system size, the month your account gets reconciled. We’ll get to those. None of them change the basic principles.
What Your Utility Actually Does When You Go Solar
From the utility’s side, connecting your solar system involves three things.
First, an interconnection application. This is the paperwork confirming your system meets New York’s safety and equipment standards. Your installer files it and manages it. At Empire Solar this happens behind the scenes, and most of our customers never see a single form, we take care of everything.
Second, a meter change. Your existing meter gets swapped or reprogrammed so it can measure electricity flowing in both directions: power you buy from the grid, and power your panels export to it. This is the “meter” in net metering.
Third, permission to operate. Once the utility signs off, your system turns on and your account starts earning credits. For a typical residential system, the utility review is a streamlined process. New York has a simplified track for home-sized systems precisely because so many of them come through. None of this requires you to negotiate with your utility, switch providers, or change your account. Your relationship with them continues. What changes is the direction your money flows.
You Stay Connected to the Grid, and That’s a Good Thing
Solar doesn’t take you off-grid, and for most homeowners it shouldn’t. The grid solves the biggest problem with solar power: your panels produce the most electricity in the middle of the day, while your home often uses the most in the evening. With a grid connection, that mismatch doesn’t matter. On a sunny afternoon, your panels run the house and push the surplus out to the grid, where your meter records every kilowatt hour. At night, or through a week of gray skies in February, you draw power back the way you always have. The credits you banked earlier cover it.
People sometimes describe this as using the grid like a battery, and it’s an accurate way to think about it, except this battery costs nothing, never degrades, and holds a summer’s worth of surplus for you until winter.
How Net Metering Credits Work
New York’s residential net metering is a 1-to-1 exchange at the full retail rate. If you pay 24 cents per kilowatt hour and your system exports 400 extra kWh this month, you get $96 in credits – the same value you’d have paid to buy that power. Not a reduced wholesale rate, the full retail rate, delivery charges included.
Two features of the credit system shape how a good solar system gets designed:
Credits roll over month to month. Your system will overproduce from roughly April through October and underproduce the rest of the year. Rollover is what makes that work. The surplus your roof generates in July sits in your account and offsets your usage in December. You’re not sizing a system for your worst month but for your whole year.
Once a year, your account trues up. On your anniversary month, the utility reconciles everything. Credits you never used get paid out, but at a much lower wholesale rate so a system designed to produce far more than you use is actually leaving money on the table. You want leftover credits landing where they offset your most expensive usage. This is a five-minute conversation with your solar designer that most homeowners never know to have.
Because credits are tied to the retail rate, they appreciate. When your utility files its next rate increase (and in New York, there is always a next rate increase), the power your roof produces becomes worth more without you doing anything.
The Two Charges That Stay on Your Bill
Solar eliminates your usage charges, but two line items remain:
The basic service charge is the flat monthly fee for having an account and a meter. Everyone pays it, solar or not.
The Customer Benefit Contribution, or CBC, applies specifically to solar customers who interconnect after 2022. It’s a small monthly fee based on your system’s size. The per-kilowatt rate varies by utility, and for a typical home system it usually adds up to somewhere between a few dollars and about ten dollars a month. It funds New York’s clean energy and low-income assistance programs, and it’s the price of keeping full retail net metering while the state transitions other programs to a newer structure.
So a strong production month doesn’t produce a $0 bill. It produces a bill with a service charge, a CBC fee, and a growing stack of credits while your neighbors’ bills track every rate increase the utility files.
Your Utility, Specifically
The framework above is statewide. Here’s what’s distinct about each service territory:
Central Hudson covers the Mid-Hudson Valley – Poughkeepsie, Kingston, Newburgh, and the surrounding areas. Full 1-to-1 net metering for residential systems, with the standard CBC based on system size.
Con Edison serves New York City and Westchester County, and charges some of the highest electricity rates in the country. That cuts both ways: painful when you’re buying, but it also means each kilowatt hour your panels produce is worth more here than almost anywhere else in America. The payback math in Con Ed territory is among the best in the state.
NYSEG covers the Southern Tier, Finger Lakes, and parts of the Hudson Valley. Same net metering framework. NYSEG customers tend to see bigger seasonal swings in their bills, which makes credit rollover and choosing the right anniversary month worth extra attention in the design.
National Grid handles most of upstate, including the Capital Region, Syracuse, and Buffalo, with full residential net metering and an annual true-up that lands in the spring.
Getting Started With Your Utility
Central Hudson, Con Edison, NYSEG, and National Grid all connect home solar, all credit at the full retail rate, and all follow interconnection rules your installer deals with every week.
We work in all four territories, and the process on your end looks the same in each: share your electric bills, and we design a system sized to your actual usage, accounting for your utility’s true-up timing, your CBC charge, and your plans for the home. Then we handle the interconnection paperwork through to permission to operate.
If you want to see how solar would work with your New York provider, request a Free Savings Plan and review the numbers for your home.
