Utilities · New York

National Grid Upstate NY in 2026: net metering, with a toll

SLWritten by the Solar Learning Lab research desk·Updated September 25, 2026·14 min read

Upstate New York is one of the last big territories where a new rooftop system still gets retail-rate net metering. That is the good news, and it is real: Phase One NEM, guaranteed for 20 years from the day the system goes in. The catch is a monthly Customer Benefit Contribution of $0.97 per kW DC that resets every January and never locks. Meanwhile the state rebate is gone for upstate homes, the federal credit died December 31, 2025, and a three year rate plan is pushing the bill up each September 1. The compensation rules are friendly. The incentive stack is thinner than any sales deck from 2024 would have you believe.

Sources: EIA Table 6, 2024 utility bundled residential sales; Niagara Mohawk CBC Statement No. 7; National Grid Upstate NY service rates page; Statement of Supply Service Charges No. 181; NYSERDA NY-Sun update, March 12, 2026; NYS IT-255 credit page; and IRS FAQs under Public Law 119-21.

The SC-1 bill a Buffalo home actually pays

Start with the benchmark. EIA's 2024 bundled residential average for Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. is 17.22 cents per kWh, across 1,430,208 residential customers, 10,935,613 MWh of sales, and $1.88 billion of revenue. That is cheap by New York standards: the statewide residential average for June 2026 was 29.49 cents, up from 26.55 a year earlier, and that number is dragged up by downstate. National Grid upstate sits far below it. Cheaper power means each offset kWh is worth less, which is why the CBC and the lost rebate bite harder here than a downstate reader might guess.

The standard residential rate is SC-1, which National Grid calls its standard electric rate for the majority of residential customers. The bill splits into a fixed Basic Service Charge, a per kWh Delivery Charge, a list of smaller riders that change monthly or annually, and a supply charge. Here is the stack for a Buffalo (Zone A) home on utility supply, as printed on the fetched pages on September 2, 2026, with supply from the August 2026 billing month statement.

Sources: National Grid Upstate NY service rates page and the Statement of Supply Service Charges No. 181. The riders not itemized above (Legacy Transition, Merchant Function, System Benefits, Earnings Adjustment Mechanism, Transmission Revenue Adjustment, VDER cost recovery, Revenue Decoupling, Clean Energy Standard, Rate Adjustment Mechanism, Arrears Management, EV Make-Ready, Energy Storage Surcharge) are published on the rate statements page; our research did not itemize their August 2026 values, and the total excludes gross receipts taxes.

Supply is where upstate differs from New England. There is no semiannual fixed default rate. National Grid's own words: charges for electricity supply are based upon market conditions during the billing period and will vary depending on where you live. The SC-1 Electric Supply Charge varies by month and load zone. If you sign with an ESCO you pay whatever you agreed to with the ESCO; if you do nothing, National Grid supplies you at the monthly market price for your zone. The August 2026 statement (No. 181, effective July 31, 2026 for batch billings and August 1 for calendar month billings) prints six different supply prices.

Source: Statement of Supply Service Charges No. 181, P.S.C. 220, Rules 46.1.1 and 46.3, issued July 28, 2026. Zone names as printed on the statement; city assignments from the load zone map. The reconciliation mechanism does not apply to NYPA-served load.

Notice Albany. Its supply cost is lower than Utica's, but its reconciliation charge is the highest of the six at 1.8637 cents, so a Capital region home paid more per kWh in August than a Buffalo home did. These numbers are one month of one year. Do not let a proposal freeze them for 25 years.

Three SC-1 variants exist and one of them matters for solar owners with batteries or EVs. The voluntary time-of-use option, SC-1 VTOU, keeps the $19.00 Basic Service Charge, adds an Incremental Customer Charge of $4.42 per month, and prices delivery at 12.633 cents on peak and super peak versus 1.299 cents off peak. On peak runs 7am to 11pm, off peak 11pm to 7am, and super peak is 2pm to 6pm in June, July, and August excluding weekends and holidays. SC-1C flips the structure: a $30.62 Basic Service Charge with a 4.452 cent delivery charge, open to anyone who would otherwise be on SC-1. And customers approved for a federal HEAP grant get an Income Eligible Basic Service Credit of $5.00, or $15.00 for electric heat. A solar customer under Phase One NEM may pick any of these underlying rates and switch once a year.

Sources: National Grid Upstate NY service rates page; PSC Order Establishing Net Metering Successor Tariff; EIA Table 6, 2024; and EIA Electric Power Monthly, table 5.6.A.

The CBC: $0.97 or $0.49 per kW, every month, never locked

The Customer Benefit Contribution is the price New York charges for keeping retail net metering alive. The 2020 order directs a separate surcharge calculated on a dollar per kW DC installed per month basis, updated annually, sized to recover what a solar customer would otherwise have paid toward utility low income programs, utility energy efficiency programs, and the Clean Energy Fund (which funds NY-Sun and NY Green Bank). In National Grid territory the formula assumes 1,144 kWh of annual generation per kW DC. For Value Stack customers the charge applies only to estimated self-consumed energy, which is why the Value Stack CBC is about half the NEM figure.

Sources: Niagara Mohawk CBC Statement No. 7, P.S.C. 220 Rule 40, dated December 17, 2025, effective January 1, 2026, exclusive of gross receipts taxes; and the NYSERDA 2026 CBC rate table, which prints the same National Grid figures. Non-solar technologies carry different rates (SC-1 fuel cell, micro-CHP, and farm waste at $6.44 NEM / $3.22 Value Stack).

Three rules from NYSERDA's fact sheet decide who pays. The CBC applies to customers who interconnect solar on or after January 1, 2022. It does not apply to pre 2022 systems, including later expansions of them, to front-of-the-meter community solar, or to demand-billed commercial accounts. And the line every proposal should quote: CBC rates change annually and customers do not lock in a rate when a system is interconnected. National Grid must file the new statement at least 30 days before each January 1, so the 2027 figure lands by early December 2026 and takes effect January 1, 2027. A model that carries $0.97 flat for 20 years is guessing. So is one that omits it.

Put it in context. On a 7 kW system the NEM CBC is $6.79 a month. Against SC-1 power at roughly 18.77 cents, that is the value of about 36 kWh of credits each month, our arithmetic. It is a toll, not a wall. But it is the one line on the bill that will still be there in year 19, at whatever rate the PSC has set by then.

Sources: NYSERDA 2026 CBC rate table and fact sheet; PSC Order Establishing Net Metering Successor Tariff; and Niagara Mohawk CBC Statement No. 7.

IT-255, RPTL 487, and sales tax are alive. The federal credit is not.

With the rebate gone, New York's tax code is doing the heavy lifting, and it does more than most states. Start with the income tax credit. The Solar Energy System Equipment Credit is 25 percent of qualified expenditures, limited to $5,000, claimed on Form IT-255. It covers purchased equipment, leased equipment under a written agreement, and written power purchase agreements of at least ten years, which is unusual; most state credits ignore third party owned systems. The system has to be at your principal residence in New York. The credit is nonrefundable, and any excess carries forward up to five years, so a modest tax bill does not forfeit it.

Sales tax next. Tax Law 1115(a)(ee) exempts receipts from the retail sale of residential solar energy systems equipment and the service of installing such systems, and also exempts receipts from the sale of electricity generated by residential solar equipment owned by a third party under a written agreement. In plain terms: no sales tax on the system, the labor, or the PPA kilowatt hours.

Property tax is where the reader has to do homework. RPTL 487 exempts real property from taxation to the extent of any increase in value from a solar energy system for a period of fifteen years, for systems constructed after January 1, 1991 and before January 1, 2030. You must apply to the local assessor on or before taxable status date. The catch is that counties, cities, towns, and villages may opt out by local law, most school districts by resolution, and jurisdictions that stay in may instead require a PILOT contract of up to fifteen years under a sixty day notification procedure. Here is how National Grid's three urban anchors stand on the state's opt-out list, records on file as of March 31, 2026.

Sources: NYS RPTL 487 local opt-out list and RPTL 487. Onondaga County's opt-out is joined by several Onondaga towns and suburban school districts not itemized in our research; check the list for your own town and district before counting on the exemption.

Read that table the way an assessor would. A Syracuse city homeowner still gets the exemption on city and school taxes, but the county line on the bill is taxable. A Clarence homeowner in Erie County loses the town exemption. And a Buffalo, Albany, or Syracuse city address, on the records fetched, is clean across city and school district. The exemption only covers the added value from the system, and only if you file with the assessor on time.

The federal side is over. IRS FAQs under Public Law 119-21 state that the 25D residential clean energy credit will not be allowed for any expenditures made after December 31, 2025, and that an expenditure is treated as made when the original installation of the item is completed. An upstate system finished in 2026 cannot claim it. Any proposal still carrying a 30 percent federal line is either stale or dishonest, and on a 17 cent power territory that error alone can flip a payback from plausible to imaginary.

Sources: NYS Department of Taxation and Finance, Solar Energy System Equipment Credit; NY Tax Law 1115; RPTL 487; and IRS FAQs under Public Law 119-21.

What the PSC decided, and what resets next

The big case is decided, and it raises the bill your solar offsets. National Grid filed its electric and gas rate case (24-E-0322 and 24-G-0323) on May 28, 2024. Parties went into negotiation October 30, 2024, a 15 party joint proposal issued for comment May 5, 2025, and the PSC adopted it August 14, 2025, establishing three year electric and gas rate plans with rate years beginning September 1, 2025. The electric increases are $167.3 million in rate year one, $297.4 million in rate year two, and $243.4 million in rate year three, levelized, equal to 3.4, 5.6, and 4.6 percent total revenue increases (6.4, 10.9, and 8.2 percent of delivery revenues). The PSC cut over $340 million, 67 percent, from the company's first year electric request of $509.6 million, approved a 9.50 percent return on equity against 10.00 requested, and authorized about $4.3 billion of electric capital investment.

Sources: DPS post-order electric rate case summary and the DPS announcement, August 14, 2025. The company had asked for $18.91 (15.29 percent) in rate year one. Rate year two and three dates are our computation from the plan's September 1, 2025 start, not a line from the summary.

For a solar shopper the translation runs two ways. The rate year two step landed September 1, 2026, a few weeks before this guide published, and rate year three follows September 1, 2027. Each step raises the retail value of a net metered kWh, which helps a Phase One NEM customer. Each step also raises what a non-solar neighbor pays, which is the comparison your payback math should use. The $19.00 Basic Service Charge and the 10.013 cent Delivery Charge in this guide are as printed September 2, 2026, after the rate year two effective date.

On the solar side, Case 15-E-0751 is the long running VDER proceeding and it is not closed. Its orders of March 9, 2017 (NEM transition and Phase One), April 18, 2019 (Value Stack compensation and Phase One eligibility), July 16, 2020 (the successor tariff and the CBC), and August 13, 2021 (the CBC order under which National Grid's Statement No. 7 is stamped) are the documents that govern every number in the net metering section above. The CBC statement is refiled every year and the next one takes effect January 1, 2027. Separately, the December 23, 2024 order in Case 14-E-0423 directed National Grid and the other utilities to let traditional and Phase One NEM customers participate in the CSRP and DLRP demand response programs, without performance payments, through tariff amendments effective February 1, 2025. A new general rate case for the period after August 2028 was not found on any fetched page.

Sources: PSC Order Establishing Net Metering Successor Tariff; Niagara Mohawk CBC Statement No. 7; NYSERDA Value of Distributed Energy Resources page; PSC order of December 23, 2024, Case 14-E-0423; National Grid Upstate NY service rates page; and the DPS post-order rate case summary.

What we could not verify

As of the September 2026 research pull, a few items stayed out of reach. National Grid's rate statements index listed no September 2026 Statement of Supply Service Charges when fetched on September 2, so the supply figures here are the August 2026 billing month (Statement No. 181); by publication a newer statement almost certainly exists and should be read directly. The smaller SC-1 riders (System Benefits Charge, Revenue Decoupling, VDER cost recovery, and the rest) were not itemized, so the 18.77 cent total is a floor before those lines, not a full bill rate. The NY-Sun upstate block chart displays per block MW and dollar per watt only on cursor hover, so the final residential block price was not captured; the fully allocated status is confirmed by both the March 2026 NYSERDA deck and the rendered chart. The Value Stack dollar components for National Grid were not pulled, so this guide describes the Value Stack's structure and its CBC but does not price its credits. The SIR document fetched is the December 2019 edition; a later revision was not confirmed. No new Niagara Mohawk general rate filing for the period after August 2028 was found. And the company's combined electric and gas customer count prints as 2.3 million on the DPS page and 2.4 million on National Grid's own; both appear above as printed. These stay gaps until a primary source closes them.

Sources: National Grid upstate rate statements page; Statement of Supply Service Charges No. 181; NY-Sun upstate block chart; New York SIR, National Grid tariff addendum; DPS rate case announcement; and the National Grid upstate rate case page.