NYSEG Hosting Capacity Map
Feeder hosting capacity across NYSEG's upstate territory — on the same map as parcels, ownership, substations, and New York's SIR interconnection queue.
Explore the Map
A patchwork territory, and why that matters
NYSEG serves roughly 20,000 square miles — about 40% of upstate New York's land area, second only to National Grid — but it does so in non-contiguous pockets interleaved with National Grid, RG&E, municipal systems, and rural cooperatives. Two farms on opposite sides of the same road can sit in different service territories, which means different portals, different queues, and an entirely different capacity picture.
NYSEG also shares its hosting capacity viewer with RG&E, both being Avangrid companies. Convenient in principle, and a quiet source of error in practice: it is genuinely easy to read a circuit, note the capacity, and not register which of the two utilities you would actually be filing with.
Long rural feeders make position on the line decisive
Rural territory means long radial circuits, and on those capacity often does thin with distance from the substation. Utilities publish it per line section as a minimum and maximum, so the number that matters is the one for the section nearest your parcel, not the circuit's best figure. Just as often the binding constraint sits at the head of the feeder instead: station transformer rating, breaker limits, ground fault overvoltage, reverse power flow at the station. On those circuits, distance along the line barely moves the number.
Upstate, both sides are hard, and they are hard independently. Acreage exists, which is why people assume land is the easy part — but site control, town solar moratoria, Agricultural District 25-AA filings, prime-farmland soils, setback and screening ordinances, and three other developers working the same landowner all bind before the grid does. Sungarden keeps NYSEG's hosting capacity map in sync and layers it with parcel boundaries and ownership, substations, and New York's SIR queue, so you can filter for feeders above your project size and then see who owns the ground near the strong end of the line.
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 all of it for NYSEGas the utility reports it — published minimum and maximum, installed DG, queued DG, and the DG connected since the last analysis refresh — and derives what's left on that basis, recorded per utility rather than assumed. You can filter for circuits with real room rather than paper room.
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 NYSEG
- 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 NYSEG publish its hosting capacity map?
NYSEG publishes feeder-level hosting capacity through the Avangrid distributed generation portal it shares with RG&E, as part of the Joint Utilities of New York's commitments under the state's Reforming the Energy Vision proceedings. One viewer covers both utilities, so it is easy to read a circuit without noticing which company's territory you are actually in.
Why does capacity fall off so sharply on NYSEG circuits?
NYSEG's territory is largely rural, which means long radial feeders running far from their substations, and on those circuits capacity often does thin with distance as voltage rise and thermal limits bind. But it is not a reliable rule: regulators and capacitors create step changes, load distribution creates local highs and lows, and the station-side criteria — ground fault overvoltage, substation transformer and bus ratings, reverse power flow through the LTC — bind hardest at the head of the feeder. A parcel two spans from the substation can screen worse than one five miles out.
Why is NYSEG territory so fragmented?
NYSEG serves a non-contiguous patchwork covering roughly 40% of upstate New York's land area, interleaved with National Grid, RG&E, and municipal systems. Two parcels a few miles apart can sit in different service territories, with different portals, different queues, and different capacity pictures. Screening by geography alone will mislead you here.
Is land or grid capacity the constraint in NYSEG territory?
Both, and they bind independently. Acreage is more available than in the downstate metro area, so people assume land is the easy part — but site control, town solar moratoria, Ag District 25-AA notices, prime-farmland soils and local setback ordinances are all live constraints. A circuit with headroom surrounded by parcels you can't option or permit is not a pipeline, which is why the capacity question and the land question have to be answered together.
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.
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