So you’re a Consolidated Edison customer looking to switch to clean energy….
If all goes well, the process of switching to clean energy as a Consolidated Edison (a.k.a. Con Edison or ConEd) customer may feel less like steps and more like an escalator. (Sorry, couldn’t help my spot-on instinct for bad puns.) That’s because there are programs in place at the utility, local, and state level in New York that can give you a substantial helping hand in reducing your climate footprint. Okay, “escalator” may be a bit of an exaggeration — I don’t want to suggest that you won’t have to do any legwork or won’t run into any obstacles — but compared to, say, the Florida Power and Light customers I discussed in my last post, you should have access to a lot of resources from Step Zero all the way through Step Three. (Although I’m focusing on ConEd here, the same goes for customers of pretty much any other New York utility, including Central Hudson Gas and Electric, New York State Electric & Gas, National Grid, Orange and Rockland, or Rochester Gas and Electric.)
The main downside of the clean energy landscape in New York is that it can get a bit confusing, just because there are so many moving parts. Fortunately, that seems to have registered with key decisionmakers, so you don’t need to bushwhack your way through a total wilderness. You can get free access to “Community Energy Advisors” across the state through a Community Energy Engagement Program administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), and learn about what clean energy programs you’re eligible for. NYSERDA also recently launched an online Energy Advisor tool — for homeowners, but also renters and landlords — that identifies available options based on the answers to a few simple questions. For those of you in New York City, the ElectrifyNYC program will provide consultation on clean energy for one to four unit residential buildings, and if you live elsewhere then it’s always worth seeing what your own local government may offer. Last but certainly not least, if you’re a Con Edison customer and not just reading this blog post for sheer entertainment value, you can also check out their website or contact their customer service center.
The bottom line: no matter what, you’re likely to be able to find programs and expert advisors to help you make the most of your climate budget — so the most important decision you can make is to go out there and get started! But if you want to get a sense of what exactly you’ll be doing, read on:
Step Zero: Get Your Home Ready
Here’s where I have the delightful experience of being able to tell you that, when it comes to ConEd’s territory, help in auditing your home and finding ways to save energy at the outset is not limited to single-family homeowners. In fact, New York offers several free energy audit programs statewide, and those are open to small multifamily buildings (four units or less) and renters (with the landlord’s authorization).
That’ll still miss a lot of you in the land of towering apartment and condo buildings, I know. If you fall in that category, ask your landlord whether they’re taking advantage of ConEd’s programs for larger multifamily buildings. If you really want to get into the weeds, you can even talk to them about the “Low Carbon Multifamily Retrofit Playbooks” that offer detailed roadmaps for decarbonizing multifamily buildings of all sizes. You may not be able to strong-arm them into anything, but some tactful questions can at least make sure they’re looking at what’s possible — especially in communities with stressed electric grids that ConEd is specifically targeting with energy-saving (or energy-producing) efforts through its Neighborhood Program. Also, remember what I said about looking to your local government? Those of you in the five boroughs may be glad to hear that New York City’s Local Law 97 will require buildings over 25,000 square feet to start lowering their energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2024, with a goal of reducing the emissions from those buildings 40 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050. Nothing like a stick to go with that carrot!
To see if you are directly eligible for a home energy audit program, you can try calling one of the Community Energy Advisors or filling out the online Energy Advisor questionnaire I mentioned. NYSERDA also offers an online tool where you can specifically identify audit programs available in your county, including programs that offer income-qualified assistance for home improvements identified in the assessment. (More information on financing programs through NYSERDA here.)
One note for those of you who do qualify for one of these assessments: it won’t necessarily include the “gold standard” of energy audits, a blower door test. (Go back to the main Step Zero page if you don’t remember what that is.) You may be able to add that on for a few hundred dollars, and it can pay off if the more detailed analysis reveals problems with your home’s HVAC system or insulating “envelope,” or if it helps with identifying the smallest and least expensive electric heat pump for installation in Step Two. I can’t tell you that for sure, though, so this is one area where I’ll fall back on my go-to advice: talk to an expert. In other words, when you’re setting up your free assessment, ask if the contractor plans to do a blower door test, and if not whether it’s recommended (mentioning specifically if you’re planning to switch from natural gas heat to an electric heat pump).
Once you’ve got your to-do list of home improvements and appliance upgrades, ConEd offers a range of incentive programs that can help you afford at least your top priorities. NYSERDA has also started a “Comfort Home” program that provides significant discounts on a home sealing and insulation package. Remember to leverage the energy assessment process to get some tailored advice from your contractor on all of the programs you can tap into — there are likely to be some out there!
Step One: Carbon-Free Electricity
When it comes to switching to carbon-free energy, New York is once again a bit more complicated than your average bear, since it’s among the states that let you “shop” for electricity from companies other than the utility in charge of delivering that electricity over the grid to your home. That’s not inherently a good thing or a bad thing, but it does mean you have a broader set of choices to look at than in places where the utility is the only game in town.
NYSERDA Renewable Progress Chart, 2020 to 2030
It’s worth noting at the outset that by living in ConEd service territory (and New York in general), you’re moving in the right direction on clean energy even if you never lift a finger to move off the default grid supply. New York’s Clean Energy Standard requires the state’s energy providers to transition their electricity mix to 70% renewable energy by 2030 and 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040. That’s up from just 27% renewables in 2020 — definitely a significant improvement in the standard electricity supply.
That said, if you want to get into the fast lane on reducing your climate footprint, and this fits in with the other items you want to cover with your climate budget, there are several options available for ConEd customers who want to max out their clean energy use:
Third-party supply: If you live in New York, you probably already know via online ads, direct mail, or some other marketing channel that you can buy your electricity supply from a third party company, while ConEd continues to maintain the “wires” to deliver that electricity to your home. Those suppliers offer both standard “brown” power and — central to our purposes — power that’s either 100% “renewable” or some lesser percentage. The state Public Service Commission (the main energy regulatory agency) provides a database where you can search and compare offers on its “Power to Choose” website, as well as some general information for consumers about how shopping for energy works.
Community renewables: New York is one of an increasing number of states that allow households to support community renewables projects connected to their local power grid, generally by “subscribing” to a share of the project’s output proportional to their home’s annual energy usage and then receiving bill credits (i.e., discounts) based on that share. (You may also hear it called community solar, although other types of projects are eligible under New York’s program.) You can look up available community renewables providers to get more details on current offers through the NYSERDA website, or the clean energy marketplace Energy Solar has a community solar search engine that’s a bit more user-friendly. An important factoid about this option: you can combine it with other approaches on this list for getting your actual electricity supply, since the “subscription” to a project is really an accounting exercise rather than a direct mechanism for powering your home.
Community choice aggregation: Don’t be confused by the name! This is different than community renewables. The basic concept of community choice aggregation is that local governments can set up a bulk purchasing arrangement to provide the electricity supply for community residents on an opt-out basis (i.e., you can choose not to sign up if you’re not interested). A community aggregation doesn’t necessarily have to include “green” options, but groups like Sustainable Winchester have used this structure as a vehicle to efficiently switch large portions of entire communities over to renewable energy — and to provide other clean energy-related information and services on topics like electric vehicles, home heating electrification, and energy management.
Home solar: Buying or leasing home solar is certainly an option on the table in New York — at least for homeowners with suitable property — given the statewide NY-SUN program provides incentives as well as special financing programs for home solar installation (plus potential federal tax benefits as well). ConEd and other New York utilities also provide “net metering" rates under which your bill is offset by the electricity you generate, and you get additional bill credits for any extra that you don’t use. The website Energy Sage has a nice overview here discussing how that works, and of course ConEd offers some answers to FAQs as well.
As always, my focus is on helping you figure out on how to make the choice between these options (if you decide this step is on your near-term to-do list) rather than telling you what to choose. With that in mind, here are some key questions to consider:
Will you actually get clean energy, and what kind? As I explain in Step One, you can’t claim to be getting clean electricity unless you actually pay for and get ownership of the “renewable energy certificate,” or REC, that captures the renewable attribute of that electricity. At this point you may or may not be asking, “how does that fit in with the state Clean Energy Standard”? The answer — whether you asked or not — is that the CES is exactly what it sounds like, a standard. No matter who you get your electricity from (unless you’re generating it yourself), your supplier is required by law to provide you with the percentage of renewable energy set as the target for that year. If you’re paying for “renewable” energy, you’re paying for the amount of clean energy above and beyond that baseline, up to 100%. So how do each of the options above help you fill that gap?
Third-party supply and community choice aggregations: Good news and bad news. The good news is that, in addition to the basic information on the Power to Choose website and in public marketing materials, these energy suppliers have to provide an “Environmental Disclosure Label” that specifies what percentage of your supply is from which type of source (e.g., solar, hydropower, biomass, the various fossil fuels, etc.). The bad news is that most of those labels are accessible through a database called NY-GATS that requires you to go through a relatively cumbersome account registration process before you can actually get to the information.
Is that doable? Yes. Should we be making it incrementally harder for you to figure out where your electricity is sourced from? No. Sometimes I want to tear my hair out over this stuff, folks. Obviously feel free to jump through the hoops, but my recommended shortcut is to just ask your potential supplier to provide you with their Environmental Disclosure Label before you sign up for anything. (Having already logged one short rant, I’ll save the one on the energy industry’s tendency toward opaque, impenetrable terminology for another day.) Once you take a look at that, you can know for sure whether your “100% renewables” match up with what you’re looking for in terms of solar vs. wind vs. hydropower, or some other resource altogether.
Community renewables: You may be surprised to hear that the community renewables option is not a one-way ticket to 100% renewables. That’s because the program requires that the RECs associated with your project subscription go to your utility rather than you. So unless the organization selling you a subscription is obtaining an additional supply of RECs to provide you with “renewable” electricity, then you’re not actually getting carbon-free supply — although you are helping to support renewable development overall in your area, which is nothing to sneeze at. Still, you should remember that it’s fine to combine a subscription with a renewable electricity supply that does include the appropriate amount of RECs — so if you want to support local solar while also getting a 100% renewable supply that’s legally yours from a third-party company or community aggregation, have at it. Just make sure you know what you’re getting with each.
Home solar: With home solar, you can be confident that — unless you’re selling the RECs generated by your system — you can truthfully claim you’re running on renewable energy. The trick here is that, although you may generate more than you use on average, you’re probably tapping into electricity from the grid at least some of the time (unless you’re relying entirely on battery backup). That grid-supplied electricity, as I explained before, includes at least some significant proportion of fossil fuel resources. Fortunately, just like with community renewables, you can sign up for a renewables offer for your grid supply to complement your own clean power — although as ConEd notes, you should check with your supplier to make sure you understand what your bill will look like under that arrangement.
How much will you pay? Ultimately you’ll have to price this out as well as you can based on your individual circumstances, whether it’s getting a quote from a solar contractor or looking at different contract terms and rates on the Power to Choose website. As I discuss in more detail in Step One, you should think about whether that price is providing the value you’re looking for when it comes to your preference for type of carbon-free energy (e.g., solar vs. wind vs. hydropower vs. nuclear). One convenient thing about New York is that renewable energy offers do have to be based on RECs from sources that are in-state or sending power into the state, so you can generally take as a given that you’re at least buying regional if not strictly “local.”
The main distinction to keep in mind among these options is that with third-party supply and community choice aggregation, you’re simply paying an ongoing cost to buy RECs from someone else each month, whereas with community renewables and home solar you’re making an investment through the cost of a subscription or system installation that provides you with bill savings in return. New York’s community renewables program may actually offer guaranteed bill discounts each month — with the tradeoff noted above that you don’t get to claim the renewable energy from “your” project. Bill savings from home solar may be less consistent, but potentially greater overall than with a community renewables subscription, and a solar contractor can help you estimate how much they’ll add up to over time. Home solar also offers longer-term benefits, if they work for your timeframe; data collected by the clean energy marketplace website Energy Sage indicates that home solar in New York will pay for itself in 9.21 years on average, after which any bill savings are pure profit on your solar investment.
Overall, there are a lot more options in ConEd service territory and New York as a whole than in a lot of other places — so if you’re finding yourself overwhelmed by having to sort through them, remember that many people would love to have your problem! But also, you have my sympathies — ConEd and New York as a whole definitely do not disprove the premise of this website, that the path of a clean energy consumer is a lot harder than it needs to be.
Step Two: Stop Burning Fossil Fuels
The theme continues at this step: there’s plenty of assistance available if you’re looking to stop burning fossil fuels and switch to carbon-free electricity for the “big three”: transportation, home heating, and hot water.
Electric Vehicles
I will take a moment to acknowledge that a lot of you may be laughing at the idea of paying for an EV and figuring out charging when you have one of the greatest public transit systems in the country at your disposal, not to mention a viable geography for getting around by bike or on foot. Look, I lived in the New York City metro area for a while, I get it — although did have a car at the time, it probably collected more parking tickets than miles on the odometer. You should absolutely feel free to skip on ahead. If you’ve read through the bulk of this website, you know that I’m all about prioritizing the items that make the biggest impact in reducing your climate footprint.
Publicly available EV charging station map from U.S. Department of Energy, https://afdc.energy.gov/stations
If you are in the market for an electric vehicle, however, the statewide “Drive Clean” program offers a rebate of up to $2000 toward purchasing or leasing an electric vehicle (including plug-in hybrids), as long as you get the vehicle through a participating dealer. That’s a great add-on to the current $7500 federal tax credit if you’re buying a new EV, but the lease option (applicable if you have a term of at least 36 months) is especially nice for those of you who aren’t ready to commit to a purchase but could use a little help on affording a trial run. Once you do hit the road, you can also anticipate perks like toll discounts for state thruways, bridges, and tunnels, and access to HOV lanes even when you’re driving alone through the Thruway Authority's Green Pass Discount Plan, the Port Authority’s Green Pass Program, and the state Clean Pass Program.
As for charging your EV — more on that when we get to Step Three below, but for now I’ll just save you some time by telling you that ConEd and the doesn’t offer any direct incentives for setting up a home charger. That’s different than some other New York utilities, but makes some sense given how much of ConEd’s service territory constitutes multifamily buildings and/or rental units. There are a range of programs covering the state to support installation of public and multifamily chargers, so you should be able to identify charging stations in your vicinity without much trouble. Given all the public charging around, it is doable to drive an EV even if you can’t just pull into your driveway and plug in. And with ongoing efforts like PlugNYC to expand charging options even further, a home charger may end up being as necessary as having a gas pump in your driveway.
Home Heating
New York is all in on “clean heat.” That includes ConEd, so for this item I’d say go ahead and start with the ConEd website to get straight to tailored information about how to switch to electric heat that you can power with your chosen source of renewable energy. If you do live in a one-to-four unit building in New York City proper, it’s also worth checking out ElectrifyNYC — that’s a city resource that offers more of a concierge-level experience and can help you combine a heating conversion with efficiency upgrades and/or solar installation. Otherwise, I don’t have much to add to what’s out there except that you should make sure to go on to Step Three in order to learn how a heat pump can actually save you money on your monthly bills.
Hot Water
ConEd incentive for an electric heat pump hot water heater? Check, to the tune of $1000. Thank you, next, as Ariana Grande would say.
Step Three: Electric Savings
Whether you’ve come out of Step Two with an EV, an electric heat pump, electric hot water heating, or some combination, you don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to leverage those investments to lower your electricity bill. In case you don’t remember how this works from Step Three, electricity can be less expensive at certain times of day. So if you get signed up for the right rate and have the right tools to manage your electricity use, then you can achieve the ultimate trifecta: clean electricity, cheap rates, and no sweat.
What are those “right” rates and tools if you’re a ConEd customer? Gee, I’m so glad you asked.
”Whole-home” time-of-use rate (non-EV drivers): If you want to go for the whole shebang, ConEd offers a time-of-use rate where you' pay less than 2 cents per kilowatt-hour (kwh) for your electricity service at night and under 10 cents/kwh during the entire fall, winter, and spring. The flip side is that any time from 8 am to midnight in June, July, August, and September, you’ll pay 25.5 cents/kwh. If you get your electricity supply from ConEd and not a third party, you’ll also pay a higher “super-peak” price for your actual power (not just the delivery over the wires) from 2-6 pm on summer weekdays. (Note that this shouldn’t be confused with ConEd’s “Smart Energy Plan,” a separate pilot time-of-use rate program that the utility has been trying out over the last few years but that’s no longer open for enrollment.) This is called a “whole home” rate for potentially obvious reasons: it applies to every kilowatt-hour of electricity you use in your home, whether it’s for your heating, cooling, refrigerator, or Bitcoin mining. If you get your electricity from ConEd, then once you’re enrolled in this rate you have to stay on it for at least 12 months; that requirement doesn’t apply if you buy electricity from a third-party supplier.
Whole-home time-of-use rate (EV drivers): This is similar to the non-EV time-of-use rate, with two special perks. First, after you’ve been enrolled for 12 months, ConEd will pay you the difference if your bills end up being higher over that year than they would have been under the standard residential rate. Second, if you provide annual proof of your EV registration, you’ll get a monthly discount on your bill of about $4.
EV-only rate: If you’re an EV driver who wants to keep things simple, ConEd will let you sign up for its time-of-use rate solely for your EV charging — as long as you pay for installation of a separate meter. Once that’s installed, the time-of-use pricing will apply to your EV charging, while the monthly billing for the rest of your electricity usage will stay the same.
SmartCharge New York: This is another option for EV owners, whether you’re on ConEd’s time-of-use rate or not. Under this program, ConEd will pay you $150 for enrolling in the program, and then you get monetary rewards for charging your EV during off-peak hours (generally nights and weekends) and for avoiding charging during peak times when the grid is more stressed (generally summer afternoons). The details are here , and there’s also a Rewards Calculator you can use to figure out how much you might earn. Unlike with the EV-only rate described above, where you have to install a separate meter for your EV, ConEd monitors your charging by gathering data from your vehicle’s onboard computer.
Smart Thermostat Program: Like many utilities, ConEd offers a program where they’ll pay you if you let them adjust your smart thermostat to reduce air conditioning use during times when the power grid is stressed, usually on summer weekday afternoons. You must have central air conditioning to participate in the electric program (there’s a part of the program for gas heat as well but that’s outside my purview here), plus you need to have or purchase an eligible thermostat model. ConEd pays you $85 to enroll as well as a $50 discount on a smart thermostat if you don’t already have one. You can always opt out of the thermostat adjustments, but if you participate in enough “events” you’ll earn $25 each summer.
Other: I try to filter out my innate biases on this site, but when they come through I’ll admit it outright: I ♥ community aggregations. You may remember I mentioned them above as a way that a whole community can buy into renewable energy (with the ability to opt-out, of course). One reason I’m a fan is that once a community starts to get engaged on energy issues, they can try out all kinds of things to complement what might be happening on the federal, state, or utility level. In this case, at least one community aggregation group — Sustainable Westchester again — has partnered with ConEd to launch a “GridRewards” program that offers bill discounts for Westchester County customers if you reduce your electricity usage a few times a year during times of peak grid stress. Even if you’re not eligible for that particular program, it’s worth keeping an ear out for similar types of rewards programs from other community aggregation groups or third-party energy suppliers.
So what are the key considerations as you’re perusing these options? Although ideally in the future you’ll be able to shift your electricity usage with an eye toward both lowering costs and maximizing your reliance on carbon-free resources, for now the main upside is saving money on your bills. And that’s a great thing! The less each of these steps cost, the further you can stretch your climate budget, and the better you’ll feel about recommending them to your friends and family. Of course, it would be most helpful if I could tell you which of these options would in fact lower the bills the most; spoiler alert, I can’t. Instead, I’ll suggest two angles of attack.
First, you could just sign up for the whole-home time-of-use rate option and give it a try. ConEd does have a time-of-use rate calculator, it’s true — and it is worth checking that out to see how easy it is to save hundreds of dollars a year even if a large majority of your usage is during those higher-price “on-peak” hours. But the proof is in the pudding, as they say, and the best way to know if and how much you’ll be able to lower your bills is through actual experience. As long as you sign up with a third-party energy supplier first (I repeat, sign up with a third-party supplier first), then you’ll be allowed to return to ConEd’s standard rate after a couple months if it turns out you are paying too much in “on-peak” charges. My suggestion would be to try for either the May-July or August-October timeframe, so you can see what your bill looks like during some of the higher-demand, higher-priced summer months and also some cooler months when you may be using less electricity and also paying lower on-peak rates. I’d also recommend that before you try this rate, you try to get the tools I discussed in Step Three for automating the management of your energy usage: a smart EV charger, smart thermostat, and some type of control for an electric hot water heater (as relevant to you, of course). If you have those in place, you should be able to “set it and forget it” to make sure your EV, air conditioning, and hot water heating use electricity at off-peak times as much as possible, and you get the lowest bills you can every month.
This “trial-and-(probably not) error” approach is especially a good idea if you' have an electric hot water heater, since the other ConEd options (SmartCharge New York and the Smart Thermostat Program) are aimed at EV and air conditioning only. The whole-home time-of-use rate is the only option, other than GridRewards if you’re eligible, where you can save money by managing all of your Step Two investments: EV, heat pump, and hot water heater. That said, if you don’t feel ready to jump right in or just don’t have time to wrangle all the details, then I’d say it’s perfectly fine to go ahead and sign up for SmartCharge New York, the Smart Thermostat Program, and/or the Westchester GridRewards program as applicable. The advantage of each of those is that there’s only upside — you may get an enrollment credit, and you may also earn credits each month or each summer, but no matter what you won’t have to worry about your bills going up because you used electricity at the “wrong” time. It is true that you may end up missing out on potential savings, but that choice is up to you. Plus you can always revisit the time-of-use rate option down the line, or wait to see what other programs pop up as time goes on.
What about the EV-only time-of-use rate? I hesitate to recommend that just because it’s got a clearly disadvantage versus the SmartCharge New York program: you have to pay for a whole separate meter for your EV. The SmartCharge New York program, on the other hand, works with your car’s computer to accomplish the same thing — letting you save money by charging off-peak — plus with a $150 enrollment credit! Of course feel free to scope it out, especially if you’re confident you can do all your charging off-peak, and let me know how it goes!
And that’s all she wrote, folks. Hopefully all of this information will make it easier for you to take your steps toward a climate smart home. But if you’re still running into big obstacles, stay tuned. ConEd has an application pending right now before the New York Public Service Commission (the state’s utility regulator) in which it’s seeking approval for a range of new and/or updated initiatives relating to clean energy. Depending on the outcome of that proceeding, you may see some helpful new programs and incentives coming down the pike in 2023. Remember in Step Zero when I suggested you actually pay attention to utility marketing materials? It’s because that’s often the best way to find out about these types of new developments. So keep an eye out — and good luck.
