Central Hudson Hosting Capacity Map
Feeder hosting capacity across the Mid-Hudson Valley — on the same map as parcels, ownership, substations, slope, and New York's SIR interconnection queue.
Explore the Map
A small territory in a crowded market
Central Hudson serves roughly 2,600 square miles of the Mid-Hudson Valley — Dutchess, Orange, Ulster, Sullivan, Greene, Columbia, Putnam and Albany counties, plus parts of Delaware and Schoharie — and around 300,000 electric customers, making it one of the smaller of New York's six Joint Utilities. It also sits in one of the state's most competitive community distributed generation markets, close enough to New York City that land carries a premium and interest in every workable circuit is high.
Small system plus strong demand produces a specific dynamic: the feeders worth having attract applications quickly, and a capacity number that looked good last quarter may already be committed. Here more than anywhere else in the state, reading capacity without reading the queue against it is a way to waste a month.
Terrain and land use disqualify sites the portal calls fine
Much of this territory climbs into the Catskill foothills and the ridges along the Hudson. Slope removes a real share of parcels that look ideal on a capacity map, and the valley adds wetlands along the river and its tributaries, agricultural district protections, and local communities that pay unusually close attention to viewshed.
None of that appears in a hosting capacity viewer. Sungarden keeps Central Hudson's hosting capacity map in sync and puts it on one map with parcels and ownership, slope, wetlands, protected areas, and New York's SIR queue — so a site that fails on gradient fails during screening rather than after you've paid for a survey.
The published number is not what's left
A hosting capacity figure is a screening value, not the room remaining on the circuit. In New York the published figure already accounts for the generation installed when the analysis was run — but that analysis runs annually, while the installed and queued totals are refreshed monthly. So the figure is net of generation as of its own refresh date, not as of today, and it is not net of the queue at all.
That makes the arithmetic easy to get wrong in both directions. Subtracting every installed megawatt double-counts what the analysis already removed and makes a workable circuit look dead. Subtracting nothing overstates the room by however much has interconnected since. The only installed figure you can subtract is the generation connected since that refresh date, which is why the utilities publish it as its own number.
Sungarden carries what Central Hudsonreports — published minimum and maximum, installed DG and queued DG — so you can see the inputs side by side instead of reading the published figure as headroom. We don't show a derived remainder for this territory yet: that needs the generation-connected-since-refresh value, and we only publish the figure where we have it.
Feeder primary voltage sits alongside it, which drives interconnection cost more than most screening tools acknowledge — a 27 kV tie is a different budget from a 13.8 kV one before any study begins.
What Sungarden loads for Central Hudson
- Feeder-level hosting capacity, as published by the utility, with line geometry
- Substations
- Parcel boundaries, with owner attributes wherever the source county publishes them (New York)
- Interconnection queue entries, mapped to a substation or feeder where the utility's data identifies one
- Not loaded yet: A full feeder dataset — voltage, ratings, and substation links beyond the hosting capacity lines
- Not loaded yet: Feeder load curves
A published hosting capacity value is the utility's own figure — we republish it rather than recalculating it. Because the New York utilities are not uniform about whether that number is already net of installed and queued generation, we normalize per utility before deriving remaining headroom, so the remainder is comparable across territories.
Frequently asked questions
Where does Central Hudson publish its hosting capacity map?
Central Hudson publishes feeder-level hosting capacity through its System Data Portal, under the Joint Utilities of New York's commitments from the state's Reforming the Energy Vision proceedings. As with the other Joint Utilities viewers, it shows circuits and capacity values but carries no parcels, no ownership, and no queue context.
Why does capacity fill up so quickly in Central Hudson territory?
It is a small territory — roughly 300,000 electric customers across the Mid-Hudson Valley — sitting next to the most valuable distributed generation market in the state. Strong community distributed generation economics and a limited number of circuits mean the good feeders attract applications fast. Queue position is often the deciding factor rather than raw capacity.
Does terrain matter more here than elsewhere in New York?
Yes. Much of the territory runs into the Catskill foothills and the ridges flanking the Hudson, so slope disqualifies a meaningful share of otherwise well-located parcels. A site can sit on a circuit with ample headroom and still fail on gradient or buildable-area grounds, which is why screening slope alongside capacity saves real time in this territory.
What non-grid constraints should I expect in the Hudson Valley?
Agricultural district protections, wetlands along the river and its tributaries, and unusually active local attention to viewshed and scenic character. None of these show up on a hosting capacity map, and all of them can end a project after you have spent money on it. Screening them at the same time as capacity is the point.
How current is the data in Sungarden?
New York's utilities publish their DG interconnection queues to the NY DPS as spreadsheets that post roughly monthly. Sungarden monitors them continuously, so a change appears as soon as it posts, and we keep prior versions so you can see a project's status history rather than just its current state. Hosting capacity is a slower-moving dataset: each utility republishes on its own cadence and we reload it when they do.
Other New York hosting capacity maps
Or start from the New York hosting capacity overview to compare every utility in the state on one map.
Find your next site in the Hudson Valley.
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