RG&E Hosting Capacity Map
Feeder hosting capacity for Rochester Gas and Electric's territory — on the same map as parcels, ownership, substations, and New York's SIR interconnection queue.
Explore the Map
A compact system with a narrow sweet spot
RG&E serves a nine-county region centered on Rochester — a small, dense territory compared with its Avangrid sibling NYSEG. Shorter feeders and more substations per square mile mean hosting capacity is distributed more evenly, and position along a circuit is less often the thing that kills a project.
The constraint moves to land instead. Circuits with real headroom tend to sit in built-up suburban areas where parcels are small and expensive, while the large affordable parcels sit further out where capacity starts thinning. The workable band is the agricultural ring just past the suburbs — narrow enough that screening capacity and parcel size at the same time beats doing them in sequence.
One portal, two utilities, two different filings
Because RG&E and NYSEG share a hosting capacity viewer, it is easy to read a promising circuit and not register which company you would actually be filing with. The capacity number is only half the information; the territory determines the queue you enter and the counterparty you negotiate with.
Sungarden keeps RG&E's hosting capacity map in sync and attributes every feeder to its utility, then layers it with parcel boundaries and ownership, substations, and New York's SIR queue — so the territory question answers itself while you are still screening.
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 RG&Eas 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 RG&E
- 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 RG&E publish its hosting capacity map?
RG&E publishes feeder-level hosting capacity through the Avangrid distributed generation portal it shares with NYSEG, under the Joint Utilities of New York's commitments from the state's Reforming the Energy Vision proceedings. Because one viewer serves both utilities, confirm which territory a circuit belongs to before you build a pro forma around it.
How does RG&E territory differ from NYSEG's?
RG&E's territory is compact and centered on Rochester, covering the city a nine-county region centered on Rochester. Circuits are shorter and substations are denser than on NYSEG's rural system, so capacity tends to be more evenly distributed and less punishing about where along a feeder you sit. The tradeoff is land: parcels close to the strongest circuits are suburban, smaller, and more expensive.
Where are the best siting opportunities in RG&E territory?
Typically the agricultural ring outside the Rochester suburbs, where parcels are still large and affordable but circuits have not yet run the long distances that erode capacity upstate. That band is narrow, which is why screening capacity and parcel size together — rather than sequentially — matters more here than in a territory with land to spare.
Does hosting capacity tell me what interconnection will cost?
No. Hosting capacity is a screening tool; the utility's Coordinated Electric System Interconnection Review — the CESIR — estimates the cost, and that estimate is refined in detailed design and trued up against actual construction. The largest CESIR line items are usually station-level and protection scope, none of which appears on a feeder hosting capacity map. Feeder headroom plus a clean queue is a necessary condition for a cheap interconnection, not a sufficient one.
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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